\ 





























































































THE GREEN TRAVELER, 



t.See page 62. 1 




w wpl 







T5 ai' l<i 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by 

S. C. GRIGGS & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



PRINTED AT THE LAKESIDE PRESS, 

CLARK AND ADAMS STS. 
CHICAGO. 



ONLY THIS: 

The Wheels in this book ran, during the summer 
of 1873, through the columns of The New York 
Examiner and Chronicle, to " the head and front 
of whose offending," the 

REV. EDWARD BRIGHT, D.D., 

who gave those wheels " the right of way," the old 
rolling stock and a miscellaneous cargo is 

Cordially Consigned. 



ROLLING STOCK AND BILL 
OF LADING. 



THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

CHAPTER. I'AGE. 

I. The "Wheel" Instinct - - - 13 

II. The Concord Coach - - - - 17 

III. The Raging Canal 23 

IV. The Iron Age - - - - - 30 
V. The Iron Horse 35 

VI. Plunging into the Wilderness - - 45 

VII. Vicious Animals - - - - 51 

VIII. Habits of Engines and Train-Men - 60 

IX. In the Saddle 68 

X. Racing and Plowing - - - - 74 

XI. Snow Bound 82 

XII. Scalded to Death - - - - 89 

XIII. All Aboard !----- 94 

XIV. Early and Late ----- 103 
XV. Dead Heads - 112 



10 



ROLLING STOCK AND BILL OF LADING. 



XVI. Working "By the Day" - - - 118 
XVII. A Slanderer and a Weather Maker 123 



Dreaming on the Cars 
" Meet Me by Moonlight " 
XX. The Maker of Cities - 
XXI. A Caboose Ride 

Hatching out a Woman 
A Flank Movement - 
Light and Shade - 



XVIII 
XIX 



XXII 
XXIII 
XXIV. 



XXV. Precious Cargoes 



- 128 
136 

- 144 
i5° 

- i54 

i59 

- 162 
168 



BAGGAGE. 



I. My Starry Days - 

II. "No. 104,163" - 

III. Our Old Grandmother 

IV. Out -Door Preaching 
V. The Story of the Bell 

VI. "My Eye!" 

VII. The Old Road - 

tflll. A Bird Heaven 



- i75 
*93 

- 206 
216 

- 223 
226 

- 241 
251 



ILLUSTRATIONS. 



is 

The Green Traveler - - - Frontispiece. 

The Concord Coach - - - - - 19 

The Baggage Smasher - - - - - 63 

A Little Late - - - - - -no 

Baggage ____---- 173 

Switch Off ____--.- 258 



THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE " WHEEL " INSTINCT. 

The perpetual lever called a wheel is the 
masterpiece of mechanical skill. At home on sea 
and land, like the feet of the Proclaiming Angel, 
it finds a fulcrum wherever it happens to be. 
It is the alphabet of human ingenuity. You 
can spell out with the wheel and the lever — 
and the latter is only a loose spoke of that 
same wheel — pretty much everything in the Nine- 
teenth Century but the Christian Religion and 
the Declaration of Independence. Having thought 
about it a minute more, I am inclined to ex- 
cept the exceptions, and say they translate the 
one and transport the other. 

Were you ever a boy ? Never ? Well, then, 
my girl, wasn't one of your first ambitions a 
finger-ring ? And there is your wheel, with a 
small live axle in it ! But whatever you are, 

(13) 



14 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

did you ever know a boy worth naming and 
owning who did not try to make a wheel out 
of a shingle, or a board, or a scrap of tin ? 
Maybe it was as eccentric as a comet's orbit, 
and only ivabbled when it was meant to whirl, 
but it was the genuine curvilinear aspiration for 
all that. Boys, young and old, " take to" wheels 
as naturally as they take to sin. I am sorry for 
the fellow that never rigged a water-wheel in the 
spring swell of the meadow brook, or mounted a 
wind-mill on the barn gable, or drew a wagon 
of his own make. My sympathies do not extend 
to his lack of a velocipede, which is nothing if 
not a bewitched and besaddled wheelbarrow. 

In fact, it seems to be the tendency of every- 
thing to be a wheel. There 's your tumbling 
dolphin, and there 's your whirling world. The 
conqueror whose hurry set on fire the axles of 
his chariot was no novelty. Who knows that 
the Aurora Borealis and the Aurora Australis, 
lighting up the sky about the polar circles in 
the night-time, may not be the flashes from the 
glowing axles of the planet ? Who knows that 
the ice and snow may not be piled up about the 
Arctic and Antarctic just to keep the flaming 
gudgeons as cool as possible ? Does Sir John 
Franklin? Does anybody? 

Take an old man's memor3 T . Only give it a 
touch, and it turns like a wheel between his two 



THE "WHEEL" INSTINCT. 15 

childhoods, and 1810 comes round before you can 
count the spokes, and 1874 hardly out of sight. 

When they made narrow wooden hands with 
slender wrists, and called them oars, and galleys 
swept the Eastern seas in a grave and stately 
way, they did well. When they fashioned broad 
and ghastly palms of canvas that laid hold upon 
the empty air, and named them sails, they did 
better. When they grouped around an axle the 
iron hands that buffeted the waves and put the 
sea, discomfited, rebuked, behind the flying ship, 
they had their wheel, and they did best! 

A one-horse wagon — for nothing was buggy 
then, but neglected bedsteads — artistically bilious, 
and striped like a beetle, with a paneled box 
high before and behind, like an inverted chapeau, 
and a seat with a baluster back, softened and 
graced with a buffalo robe, warm in winter — and 
in summer also — was one of the wheeled won- 
ders of my boyhood. No sitting in that wagon 
like a right-angled triangle — room in front for 
any possible length of leg, and a foot -stove 
withal — room behind for two or three handfuls 
of children, and a little hair-trunk with a bit 
of brass-nail alphabet on the cover. Curiously 
enough, the wagon was owned by that noble 
Baptist pioneer of the New York North Woods, 
Elder — not Reverend but revered — John Blod- 
gett, and in it he used to traverse " East road," 



l(i THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

and " West road,'* and " Number Three road," 
and go to Denmark and Copenhagen and Leyden 
and Turin, and other places in foreign parts, 
without shipping a sea, or, to borrow a morsel 
of thunder, without " seeing a ship." His was 
the voice of " John crying in the wilderness" — 
John, the Beloved disciple, he surely was. 

Before he went to " the Ohio," for that is 
what they called it in the years ago, he preached 
a farewell . to the saddened friends, " Sorrowing 
most of all that they should see his face no 
more," and then some Christians, some children 
and some sinners accompanied him ten miles on 
his way, and, after that, the paneled wagon was 
lost in the wilderness and the West, and we all 
turned sorrowing home, and his words "no more" 
proved true. 

And the next wheeled wonder was a calash- 
topped chaise, heavy, squeaky on its two great 
loops of leather springs, and a swaying, sleepy 
way with it, that, for the occupants was as easy 
as lying, but for the horse as wearisome as Pil- 
grim Christian's knapsack of iniquity. 



THE CONCORD COACH. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE CONCORD COACH 



Fifty miles north of Utica, New York, as the 
crow flies, there is a village. What there was 
of it in the old clays lay in the bottom of a 
bay of land bounded on the north, south, and 
west by wooded hills, with some stone-mason 
work in them older than the Vatican. But now 
the beautiful town rises like a spring-tide high 
up the green sides of the bay. Once in twenty- 
four hours over the south hill lurched a stage- 
coach. The tin horn was whipped out of its 
sheath by the driver, and a short, sharp, nasal 
twang rang out, rising sometimes in one long 
clear note, that warbled awa}^ in an acoustic 
ringlet, like its aristocratic cousin with a mouth 
like a brazen morning-glory — the bugle. 

Every thing in the little village was broad 
awake. Doors flew open, faces were framed in 
at the windows, children hung on the gates. 
Then the driver gathered up the ribbons of his 
four-in-hand, swung off from the coach-top his 



18 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

long-lashed whip with its silken eracker, flicked 
artistically the off leader's "nigh" ear, gave the 
wheelers a neighborly slap, and with jingle of 
chains and rattle of bolt, and a sea-going rock 
and swing, down the hill he thundered and 
through the main street, the horses' ears laid 
close to their heads like a running rabbit's, a 
great cloud of dust rolling up behind the leather 
" boot " the color of an elephant, the passengers 
looking out at the stage windows, until, with a 
jolt and one sharp summons of the horn, like the 
note of a vexed and exasperated bee, the craft 
brings-to at the Post-office, and the driver whirls 
the padlocked pouch out from under his mighty 
boots to the ground, and then exploding the tip- 
end of his twelve-foot lash like a pistol-shot, he 
makes a sweep and comes about with a rattling 
halt in front of the stage-house. The fat old 
landlord^ — fat and old when you were a boy, and 
alive yet — shuffles out in slippers, opens the 
coach-door, swings down the little iron ladder 
with two rounds, and the passengers make a 
landing. One of them may have been General 
Brady, the man who said, or so they say, when 
told he could not survive the illness that pros- 
trated him, " Beat the drum, the knapsack 's 
slung, and Hugh Brady is ready to march!" Or 
it may have been Joseph Bonaparte, ex-king, 
and yet with his head on, which is not after 



THE CONCORD COACH. 



19 



the historic manner of monarchs out of business, 
going to his wilderness possessions in the North 
Woods. Or it may have been Frederick Hass- 
ler, the Swiss, Chief of the United States Survey 
in the long ago, en route for Cape Vincent — the 
man who knew more and tougher mathematics 




THE CONCORD COACH 

than all of his successors together, and who 
could say more while the hostlers were changing 
horses than anybody else could say in sixty 
minutes. Meanwhile the spanking team, loosed 
from the coach, file off in a knowing way and 
a cloud of steam, meeting with a snort of recog- 
nition the relay that is filing out to take their 
places. 

That yellow, mud-bespattered stage, with " E. 

3* 



20 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

MERRIAM, No. something" blazoned on the doors, 

was the one thing that linked the small village 
with the great world, brought tidings of wars, 
accidents and incidents, that had grown gray on 
the journey, and word from far-away friends 
whose graves might have waxed green while the 
letters they had written, and secured with a 
round red moon of a wafer, and sealed with a 
thumb or a thimble, were yet trampled beneath 
the driver's feet like grain on the threshing-floor. 
Think of that coach creeping like an insect, for 
sixpence a mile, and five miles to the hour, to 
and fro between East and West, the only estab- 
lished means of communication ! Think of its 
nine passengers inside, knocked about like the 
unlucky ivories in a dice-box, between New York 
and Detroit, between Boston and Washington. 
They get in, all strangers ; the ladies on the back 
seat, the man w T ho is sea-sick, by one coach- 
window, the man that chews " the weed, it was 
the devil sowed the seed," at the other ; some- 
body going to Congress, somebody going for 
goods, somebody going to be married. They are 
all packed in at last like sardines, with perhaps 
an urchin chucked into some crevice, to make 
all snug. There are ten sorts of feet, and two 
of a sort, dovetailed in a queer mosaic upon the 
coach-floor. The door closes with a bang, the 
driver fires a ringing shot or two from his whip- 



THE CONCORD COACH. 21 

lash, and away they pitch and lurch. Think of 
them riding all day, all night, all day again, 
crushed hats and elbowed ribs, jumping up and 
bouncing down into each other's laps every little 
while with some plunge of the coach ; butting 
at each other in a belligerent way, now and 
then, as if u Aries the ram" were the ruling 
sign for human kind ; begging each other's par- 
don, laughing at each other's mishaps, strangers 
three hours ago, getting to know each other well 
and like each other heartily, and parting at last 
with a clasp of the hand and a sigh of regret. 
I think a fifty-mile battering in a stage-coach 
used to shake people out of the shell of their 
crustaceous proprieties, and make more lifelong- 
friends than a voyage of five thousand miles by 
rail. The contemplation for a day or two of a 
woman's back-hair or a man's bumps of com- 
bativeness, is about as merry as a catacomb tea- 
party, and about as conducive to lively friend- 
ships. 

All of us who have arrived at years of dis- 
cretion — had Methuselah? — have had a suspicion 
for some time that this is not the same world 
we were born into. Such a looking-over-the- 
shoulder as the writer has just indulged in 
brightens the dim suspicion into certainty, It is 
a grander world, with grander needs and agencies 
to match. The little iron wheels have trundled 



22 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

the big wooden wheels out of the way. The 
dear old Concord coaches of the past are driven 
to the confines of civilization. Jehu has swung 
himself down from his box, thrust the butt end 
of his whip-stock into the tin horn's mouth, hung 
them up on a nail behind the door, and died. 
The swallows flash in and out at the diamond 
lights in the old stage barn, its only occupants. 
I visited Fort Scott a while ago — Fort Scott, 
Kansas, that wonderful bit of metropolitan vigor 
in the wilderness. The Missouri, Kansas and 
Texas Railroad had reached it, and gone on to 
the Indian country. It had been a grand center 
for radiating stage lines, and the day the stages 
were to break up camp at Fort Scott and go 
deeper into Kansas, farther into Missouri, some- 
body, who had caught the sentiment of the 
thing, proposed that all the coaches should be 
grouped in one place, and a photographer should 
train his piece of small artillery upon them, and 
so they should be " taken." The picture is 
before me. The four-in-hands, the great coaches, 
the snug covered hacks for the cross cuts, the 
drivers in position, drivers and stages alike " all 
full inside," and a sprinkling of deck passengers. 
It was the work of an instant ; the coaches were 
emptied and wheeled away, to be seen and heard 
and welcomed and looked after in Fort Scott 
no more. 



THE RAGING CANAL. 28 



CHAPTER III. 



THE RAGING CANAL. 



The world has certainly grown. Putting the 
period just in time, the statement is a safe one 
— " has certainly grown." When De Witt Clin- 
ton developed the Dutch idea in America, and 
made a line of poetry from tide-water to Lake 
Erie, which people vilified and christened " Clin- 
ton's Ditch," the world was not quite ready for 
it, and the Governor went ahead in a canal-boat ! 
Fancy that world distanced by a three-horse- 
power tandem team at six miles an hour to-day. 

But it was a stately affair then. There was 
a barrel of salt water standing at the bow of 
the packet-boat. There was the proud and portly 
Governor erect behind the barrel like Virgil's 
ears of attention — arrectis auribus. There were 
the horses rosetted and bespangled. There were 
the high and mighty dignitaries on deck, clus- 
tered like young bees on a hive's front door-step 
at swarming time. There were the enthusiastic 
crowds along the way« Arrived at Buffalo, amid 



24 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

surges of music and rattle of cannon, the Chief 
Executive poured that brackish Atlantic water 
into the fine indigo blue of Lake Erie. It was 
was not quite so grand as the old ceremonial 
when the Doge of Venice wedded the Adriatic, 
but it meant a great deal more. It meant Bishop 
Berkely, who said something about a Westward- 
going star, of which some mention has been made 
once or twice. It meant Ohio, Michigan, Illi- 
nois, in that far future which is our instant 
present. It meant empire ! You can count the 
acts that have meant more, within a hundred 
years, upon four fingers and a thumb — more than 
ladling out that barrel of sea-water in a strange 
place. Well, the boats began to slide along the 
thoroughfare of water, and go up stairs and down 
stairs in a strange way ; and they multiplied like 
the sluggard's schoolma'am, — who was his ant, 
also, — till there are boats in sight in summer 
days everywhere between Buffalo and tide-water ; 
and they grow larger, till there are a thousand 
craft on the Erie Canal of greater tonnage than 
the vessel from whose deck Lawrence sent up the 
dying charge that made him as deathless as the 
Pleiades. 

The cargoes of those boats, when they began 
to creep, was something wonderful : men, women 
and children , plows, axes and Bibles ; teachers, 
preachers and Ramage presses, along with bed- 



THE RAGING CANAL. 25 

steads that corded up and creaked like gates in 
high winds ; big wheels, little wheels and reels, 
looms with timber enough in them for saw-mills 
and a log or two left to begin upon. So you 
see, when they went West in those days they 
packed up their homes and took them along. 
You were sure of their finding anchor-ground 
somewhere, for how could a man go adrift with 
a wife, five children, a brass kettle and a feather- 
bed tied to him ? You were sure, too, that the 
world would not be wronged out of a home — 
perhaps a better and a happier one than the 
man set afloat on Clinton's Ditch for a place 
nearer sundown. 

Thus it was that the grand westward drift of 
things received its first impulse. Churches with 
steeples to them, school-houses full of children, 
newspapers, farms, Christian homes, not one of 
which appeared on the bills of lading, were all 
tumbled aboard the canal-boat amidships or some- 
where, though nobody seemed to knoAv it. The 
mighty fleet of white-decked " liners, 1 ' looking 
like Brobdignagian — that word won't hurt you if 
you don't go near it! — ants' eggs with windows 
in them, has had more to do with the march of 
civilization than all the aquatic armaments that 
ever thundered. Sometimes, scurrying along in the 
cars at thirty miles an hour, you catch glimpses 
of nests of these eggs adrift in the green fields, 

4 



26 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

floating by the white villages, and advancing, by 
contrast, so wonderfully slow that they go back- 
ward. Now and then a chit of a girl, with a 
little market-basket of garden vegetables upside 
down on the top of her head, or a young fellow 
avIio parts his hair in the middle, and has nothing 
else to part with worth mentioning, catches a 
glimpse of the eggs, too, and tosses a sniff of 
contempt at them out of the window, never 
dreaming that he looks upon a letter or two of 
the alphabet of progress. 

I never see one of those boats without a sigh 
of regret, not because I want to be captain or 
cook or anything, but because I took my first 
foreign voyage on one of them, and the boat was 
a "liner" at that! We " took ship" at Oneida, 
took water along the way, took soundings when 
we ran aground, took steamer at Buffalo. It was 
a taking trip. Of the passengers, one turned into 
Doctor of Divinity, another into Professor of Latin 
in the University of Michigan, a third into Pres- 
ident of a Southern College, a fourth into the 
pastor of a Michigan church, two bright and 
pleasant young ladies into dust long ago, and the 
seventh and youngest into the writer of this 
sketch. 

It was a merry, care -free party. Not one of 
the survivors can say that for himself to - clay. 
We were clustered in the little forward cabin. 



THE RAGING CANAL. 27 

We ran over the deck to the after -cabin for 
meals. We sat upon our baggage, and took some- 
thing more than a bird's-eye view of the country. 
We told stories and sang songs and dreamed 
dreams. We went into cool locks where the 
water splashed and tumbled about the bows, and 
were glad. We suffocated ourselves with blan- 
kets when we crossed the Montezuma mosquitoes. 
Why not? Verily, there is but one Marsh there, 
but of mosquitoes there are several. I have heard 
of Montezuma's death, It was some time ago, but 
it would have been no wonder had he died young, 
not because of the love of the Gods, but of the 
mosquitoes. We sat on the deck and watched the 
steersman's intonations. When he cried, " Low 
bridge / " we merely ducked our heads ; but when 
he said, "Low bridge!" down we went flat upon 
the floor like a parcel of undiscovered idolaters. 
The Palinurus slued the stern of the boat 
around, and we leaped off upon the " heel-path " 
and took a stroll. He drove bows on upon the 
opposite shore, and we took a walk on the " tow- 
path " with the "drive," who looked like a bun- 
dle of old clothes, was as smart as a whip, and 
profane as "our army in Flanders." He sang 
songs through the night and the rain as happy 
as a frog, and when, covered with mud and water, 
he came aboard to eat, he looked like a bewil- 
dered muskrat, and his tracks like a muskrat's also. 



28 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

We used to hear one genuine word of old Eng- 
lish in those seafaring days. Perhaps some other 
ambitious "liner" was pulling out ahead of us. 
You confer with the "drive" as to the chance 
of passing it. You offer him a shilling to try, 
and his under jaw drops like the lower half of 
a bellows. But promise him a "scale" — scale, 
skilling, shilling — and he gets all the tough pull 
out of his tandem that there is in it, and goes 
by if he can. Websterian "probabilities " says 
that is not the derivation of " scale " at all, but 
no matter. So you see, we went to sea without 
leaving shore. Now and then a cigar-shaped 
packet, fuller of windows on the sides than ever 
a German flute was of finger-holes, w r ould pass 
us with a swash and the blast of a bugle to 
" open lock," and the three horses at a swinging 
trot, the deck crowded with passengers, and the 
cook in the kitchen stewing and frying and 
roasting himself and the dinner in the same 
kettles. 

It was the aristocrat of canal craft, the packet 
was, the captain was somebody, and wore gloves, 
and when on my voyage I saw one coming, I 
went down into the cabin, red as to my ears 
for something I had forgotten, and that I never 
found in time to come out of the egg till the 
packet had gone by. It has since occurred to 
me that possibly the redness of ears at that 



THE RAGING CANAL, ±^ 

time might not have been a quality so remark- 
able as their length. How you would like the 
snuggery of the cabin now, and the shelf of a 
berth that you couldn't turn over in if a heavy 
fellow happened to be sagging on the shelf above 
you, and the canal-banks even with the top of 
your head when you sit down, and the sun about 
as hot upon the roof as if he had actually taken 
a deck passage and come bodily aboard, is not 
a matter of doubt. But the memory of that 
voyage is pleasant, after all — after all what? all 
these years ; like the music of Caryl, " pleasant 
but mournful to the soul." And should this short 
story of a long voyage bring back to any reader 
some such journey that he took in the years that 
are gone, some cheerful hours he spent, some 
cherished friends he made, some faces he learned 
to love, that for him shall never be changed nor 
sent away, then these paragraphs are not vain. 



30 THE WORLD ON WHEELS, 



CHAPTER IV. 



THE IRON AGE 



They tarried longer by the way in those days, 
and they lived longer, most of them. I think, 
too, they knew each other better, possibly loved 
each other more, when they went six miles an 
hour, than we know each other now that we go 
sixty. Mind, I would have nobody turn into 
muriate of soda and make a Lot's wife of him- 
self on my account, but then a harness with 
neither hold-back nor breeching is a dangerous 
thing unless the world is a dead level, than 
which nothing is so very dead, not even a grave- 
yard. The world has certainly grown. These 
sketches are written at a place in the State of 
New York known on the old maps as Chadwick's 
Bay. It is flanked by one of the loveliest vil- 
lages in all the empire. To that village came 
the late Rev. Dr. Elisha Tucker, whose mem- 
ory is yet fragrant in the churches — then neither 
Reverend nor Doctor, but the plain and primi- 
tive Elder Tucker — came with his young wife, 



THE IRON AGE. 31 

who went a thousand miles alone, a while ago, 
to visit friends! — came from Buffalo forty miles 
along the Lake shore to that lovely village in 
a one-horse wagon, and took up his life work. 
There was not a Baptist church west of him. 
He preached the first sermon anybody ever heard 
in Cleveland. A schooner with rusty sails came 
sliding into Chadwick's Bay with his small store 
of household wealth. The painted Senecas and 
the smoky Onondagas went gliding about like 
vanishing shadows. Deer trooped across the land- 
scapes like flocks of sheep. Speckled trout — 
nature's great piscatorial triumph, if they didn't 
weigh but a pound apiece — spotted with carmine 
and gold, leaped out of the cold brooks into the 
sunshine. There is a roll of dull thunder day 
and night within ear-shot of where I write these 
lines at Chadwick's Bay. Twenty-five hundred 
cars rumble by every twenty-four hours. Flocks 
and herds from a thousand hills and plains roll 
along on iron casters like pieces ot heavy cabinet- 
work. Broad harvests trundle Eastward to tide- 
water. They rattle over the lines of longitude, 
and set them together in their flight like the 
stripes on the American flag. 

It is the World on Wheels. 

The story of the Locomotive is the history of 
mechanical invention. It is, if you please, the 
monogram of the right-hand cunning of mankind. 



32 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

In its finished state, standing upon the track as 
it does to-day, in its burnished bravery of steel 
and brass, its shining arms thrust into the cas- 
kets slung lightly at its sides, ready at an in- 
stant's notice to pluck out great handfuls of 
power and toss them in fleecy volumes along the 
Avay — I want Job to take a look and tell us all 
about it. He that so described a horse of flesh 
and blood that Landseer could have painted the 
creature if he had never seen one, must be able 
to handle the Locomotive without gloves. Job 
would have been the man for the job. 

Did you ever tell anybody that the Locomo- 
tive is a familiar acquaintance of yours — that 
you are on speaking terms with it? If you never 
did, then never do, for it will strain your list- 
ener's credulity and your credibility fearfully. 
I have a sort of toach-the-brim-of-the-hat respect 
for the thing, and am never so busy that I can- 
not give it a civil look as it goes by. The dull 
prose strikes into a quickstep as I think about it: 

Would ye know the grand Song that shall sing out the age — 

That shall flow down the world as the lines down the page — 

That shall break through the zones like a North and South river, 

From winter to spring making music forever ? 

I heard its first tones by an old-fashioned hearth, 

'T was an anthem's faint cry on the brink of its birth ! 

'T was the tea-kettle's drowsy and droning refrain, 

As it sang through its nose as it swung from the crane. 



THE IKOiV AGE. 33 

T was a being begun and awaiting its brains — 
To be saddled and bridled and given the reins. 
Now its lungs are of steel and its breathings of fire, 
And it craunches the miles with an iron desire, 
Its white cloud of a mane like a banner unfurled, 
It howls through the hills and it pants round the world ! 
It furrows the forest and lashes the flood, 
And hovers the miles like a partridge's brood. 

Oh ! stand ye to-day in the door of the heart. 

With its nerve raveled out floating free on the air, 

And feeling its way with ethereal art 

By the flash of the Telegraph everywhere, 

And then think, if you can, of a mission more grand 

Than a mission to LIVE in this time and this land ; 

Round the World for a sweetheart an arm you can wind, 

And your lips to the ear of listening Mankind ! 

There used to be a question and answer in the 
old manuals of Chemistry that shut together like a 
pair of scissors : " What are the precious metals ? 
Gold and silver." How will it do to amend and 
let the mouthful of catechism run thus : " What 
are the precious metals ? Iron and brass/' Iron 
for wheels, and brass for people ! That is better 
because it is truer. Whoever is curious to know 
how the name of a certain alloy of copper and 
zinc came to take in a mental and moral quality 
as a third ingredient, need only post himself a 
little in insular literature. The rich ore of the 
copper mines of Cyprus was called Cyprian brass. 
Venus was the chief divinity of the Cyprian peo- 
ple's adoration. Queerly enough, their quality 



34 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

struck into their mines like a thunderbolt, and the 
name of the hard, glittering, resounding metal 
came to have a meaning that could not possibly 
pertain to a well-behaved pair of brass andirons. 
Brass in the face is a good thing in a wrong 
place, but besides making a capital bearing for a 
rail-car axle, a little in a man's purposes, as the 
world goes, is not so very bad an alloy after all. 
It may make them last longer, if nothing more. 



THE IRON HORSE. 35 



CHAPTER V. 



THE IRON HORSE. 



The world had to wait a weary time for its 
wheels, simply because the successors of Tubal 
and Jubal took something for granted. It is 
never safe, as every day's experience proves, to 
take anything or anybody for granted. The only 
safety in praising the average man is to hold on 
to your eulogy till he is dead, and done doing 
altogether. What the cunning artificers took for 
granted was this : an engine's pulling power is 
equal to its own weight. And so they made 
wheels with teeth, and rails with cogs, to help 
the thing along. They rigged an anomalous, pre- 
Aclamite fowl's foot with a corrugated sole, on 
each side of the engine. These feet were set 
down one after the other upon the roughened 
rail, and pushed the awkward affair in a sort of 
dromedary way, monstrous to contemplate and 
tedious to wait for. Device followed device, all 
as vain as the achievement of perpetual motion, 
until some man, after a Columbus fashion when 

5 



06 THE WORLD OX WHEELS. 

he played with a lien's egg, said : Is this true 
that we have all been taking for granted 7 Will 
not an engine pull more than its own weight? 
Let us try it. They did, and it did. It trailed 
long streets and great towns of cars — which were 
warehouses and dwellings and palatial mansions ; 
which were sheep-folds and cattle-yards and coal 
mines — after it at twenty, forty, fifty miles an 
hour, as if real estate belonged to the ornitho- 
logical kingdom, and had taken perpetual flight 
like Logan's cuckoo. 

When you see a brace of iron bars laid par- 
allel upon the ground, and a harp of wire strung 
along beside it, you see the fragment of a man 
that can never indulge in a soul without bor- 
rowing one. It is the line of a mighty muscle, 
and the thread of a fine nerve. On the one, 
thoughts fly — thoughts that are "up and dressed*' 
in their verbal clothes. On the other, things. 
The one is seven -ninths of a Scriptural aspir - 
tion five -ninths realized: u O that I had the 
wings of a dove, that I might fly away — and 
be at rest." The other is the consolidated arm 
of Christendom, the common carrier of the mov- 
able world. But grand as it is, and priceless as 
are the treasures it is bearing, it was too late 
for the holiest burden of all time. There was no 
train to Jerusalem, and the Lord of Life rode into 
the city in the humblest guise, upon a donkey. 



THE IRON HORSE. 37 

At Omaha, one day, I saw a steam caravan 
come in from what used to be a " forty years 
in the wilderness" region, direct from the Golden 
Gate. It was the tea -train from the Celestial 
Kingdom. It was nothing to look at — the dingy, 
battered cars, the engineer as if he had been 
wrestling with a coal-heaver — but it was much 
to think of. That cargo came right out of the 
West, straight from the "Drowsy East.' 1 The 
bars of the trans-continental railroad had careened 
the horizon with their mighty leverage, and let 
the cargo through — the very cargo for which they 
waited in the old days with their faces toward 
the rising sun, like a praying Israelite. The loco- 
motive had wheeled the rolling globe a half rev- 
olution, brought the tide of commerce to the 
right-about, like a soldier upon his heel. It has 
proved to be anything but what it was sus- 
pected of being — the locomotive has — for, made 
to be a common carrier, a gigantic, quicktime 
dray-horse, it is a civilizer, a builder of cities; 
and if the three W's, Messrs. Wesley Brothers 
and Whitefield, will forgive me, a sort of — 
Methodist; in fact, an outright circuit-rider, and 
a missionary, withal! The preachers of flesh and 
blood denounced the seraglio and the harems of 
the American Desert, but nobody minded it. 
The law-makers frowned upon them, and they 
grew like a garden of cucumbers ; were about 



38 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

as far beyond their jurisdiction as the household 
economy of " the man in the moon." The loco- 
motive made for them at last, from Atlantic and 
Pacific ; it brought the Gentiles and the " Saints " 
shoulder to shoulder ; its mountain-eagle elocution 
rang through the valleys of Utah, and sooner 
or later it will whistle that barbarism of the 
Orient down the wind. 

The locomotive is a civilizer. It happened to 
the writer to witness the splendid display of 
the Missouri State Fair at Kansas City, that 
young Chicago of the red Missouri. Altogether 
it was the most admirable display of agricultural 
products ever seen in the Far West. Than the 
artistic grouping of apples in vast variety, noth- 
ing finer was ever witnessed. They were literally 
4i apples of gold in pictures of silver. 7 ' Without 
spot or blemish, better than ever grew in the 
Garden of Eden, they were all from the orchards 
of the wilderness. But the most interesting and 
suggestive department, as having direct reference 
to the civilizing agency of the locomotive, was 
one surmounted with the legend, " The Great 
American Desert." 

Not a thing in it that did not come from the 
once sterile plain or inaccessible mountain region; 
that was not grown in the very realm set down 
upon maps hardly twenty years old as a path- 
less and arid waste ; and not a figure pictured 



THE IRON HORSE. 39 

in it, but a bewildered buffalo or a mounted 
savage ; that was not made possible by the magic 
touch of railroad iron. What a maker of new 
and improved maps is the locomotive ! That 
department was worthy to be the coat-of-arms 
of the Angel of Abundance. Above all, were 
the antlers of the elk, like the branches of a 
blasted tree; and the shaggy head of a buffalo, 
curly as the head of the heathen god of wine. 
Then there were stalks of corn that would amaze 
you, and as full of ears as Mr. Spurgeon's audi- 
ences. There were squashes and melons and 
pumpkin-pies in "the original package," in whose 
case the usual law of limitation had been sus- 
pended, and they had grown on without let or 
hindrance. Wheat that Illinois would have been 
proud of. Minerals of wonderful richness and 
beauty. Grapes in clusters of ideal symmetry 
and size. Apples as of a fresh and new crea- 
tion that no blighting bug or worm had yet 
found out. Indeed, think of anything you like 
best that grows in a garden, and it was there, 
all from the Great American Desert. There was 
an address to the assembled thousands, but noth- 
ing so eloquent as this upon the power of the 
locomotive as a cultivator and civilizer. But for 
it, the products would never have been here in 
Kansas City, nor the producers there in the 
wilderness. 



40 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Take the Illinois Central Railway; it was to 
that splendid State what the rod of Moses was 
to the rock in the wilderness. It smote it into 
life and luxuriance. Down from Chicago to Cairo, 
just as many miles as there are days in a year, 
down from Dunleith to that same capital of 
modern Egypt, four hundred and fifty -six miles, 
it went, — in its time the stateliest railway en- 
terprise in the world. Had you been a passen- 
ger on a southward-bound train of that road, say 
sixteen years ago, you would have traversed a 
region of magnificent possibilities. True, the lo- 
comotive would have hurried you through un- 
fenced corn-fields nine miles long, whose rows 
swung round as the cars flew on, like vast bri- 
gades on drill, but you would have struck out, 
at last, upon the untilled and almost untrodden 
pastures of God. You could never forget it. 
The month was September. The train had 
reached the center of a grand prairie. The few 
passengers debarked, and the train ran on a 
half mile and left us alone. Around on every 
side, the prairie curved up to the edge of the 
sky. It was a mighty bowl, and we, served up 
in the bottom of it, a very diminutive bill of 
fare for such a tremendous dish. The gaudy 
yellow and red Fall flowers ornamented the bowl 
like some quaint pattern for Chinese ware. Not 
a, tree nor a living thing in sight; not a sign 



THE IRON HORSE. 41 

that man had ever been an occupant of the 
planet, but something that looked like a cigar- 
box high up the side of the bowl, and was, in 
fact, a human habitation. The great blue sky 
was set down exactly upon the edge of the dish, 
like the cover of a tureen, and there we were, 
pitifully belittled. The feeling was oppressive. 
We had nothing small or mean with which to 
compare ourselves and be somebody again, and 
were glad to have the train back once more, that 
we might clamber in and be safe out of the 
vastness. 

On we went till the pleasant little village of 
Anna was reached. The country was full of 
peaches. They ripened and fell beside the roads. 
The swine were fattened upon them. The people 
had just begun to learn that peaches were money 
in disguise. The railroad had just taught them 
this lesson of finance. It had made Chicago, and 
Union County peaches possible combinations. But 
they were only beginners, and when you asked 
a man perched upon a wagon-load of Sunnysides 
the price, he said, " How many, stranger?" and 
when you replied, " A couple of dozen," the 
answer came back like the shutting of a jack- 
knife blade, " Take 'em along an' welcome ! " 
The locomotive whistled us to quarters, and by- 
and-by the speed slackened to eight miles an 
hour. The windows were garnished with heads 



4l> THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Hi a twinkling. There was a deer on the track, 
and bound south, like ourselves. The engineer 
crowded him a little, and throwing back his head, 
away he went over ties and culverts and little 
bridges, the cow-catcher turned into a deer-catcher 
for the moment. Again the engineer would let 
up a little to give the fellow a chance, and so 
for miles, till at last, as if he had wings to his 
heels, he bolted the track, bounded over a little 
knoll and was gone. 

Now, find that big bowl of ours if you can ! 
Farms checker the prairie. Villages dot the 
broad landscape like flocks of sheep. Cities with 
mayors to them have sprung up. The locomo- 
tive brought the builders, brought the buildings. 
In a word, the motive was the Zoeomotive. Take 
the Chicago & Northwestern Railway across the 
States of Illinois and Iowa, across the Rock and 
the Mississippi to the banks of the Missouri, four 
hundred and eighty-eight miles to Council Bluffs. 
Seven years ago its western terminus was New 
Jefferson, Iowa. There you took private convey- 
ance for a journey of one hundred and eighty 
miles to the Missouri. You launched out over 
the great swells of prairie, rising and falling, rising 
and falling, till you almost caught yourself list- 
ening for the wash of the heavy sea. Little 
hamlets at long intervals showed like unnamed 
islets. The wolf looked after you as you passed. 



THE IRON HORSE. 48 

The hawks sat in rows on the telegraph wire 
over which, that minute, a message was flashing 
to California, the little hawks all facing us with 
their aquiline countenances, like so many young 
Romans. The tall prairie grass waved desolately 
in the wind. The prairie poultry disputed the 
right of way with the advancing horses. The 
quick tick of the locusts, all winding their 
watches at once, sounded loud and clear in the 
silence. Dismantled stage barns roofed with prai- 
rie hay were sparsely sprinkled along the route. 
At last we struck out upon a thirty-mile stretch 
without a human habitation. The clouds and the 
sun played tricks with the landscape. Now you 
thought you saw a field of red wheat ripe for 
the sickle, and now a scraggy old orchard dwarfed 
in the distance. The one was a family of little 
oaks, the other the long tawny grass of the prai- 
rie slopes. 

It was a virgin world. You had escaped from 
the clank of engines and the clamor of men. The 
air swept by without a taint of smoke or any 
human naughtiness. Your pulse played with an 
evener beat. You were not quite sure you ever 
wanted to get out of the wilderness at all. You 
meet now and then a " freighter," as the ox- 
expressmen of plain and prairie are called, with 
their noisy tongues and explosive whips, and their 
four, six, eight yokes of lumbering oxen trailing 



44 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

a yet more lumbering wagon. Then you come 
to Ida Grove, with a hospitable tavern in it. 
Then fifty miles down the Maple Valley, as un- 
peopled and peaceful as the Happy Valley of 
Rasselas. Seven years ago! And now it is farms 
and houses and villages all the way. Churches 
point their slender white fingers towards the sky. 
School-houses hum with the busy tongues of the 
disciples of "b, a, ba, k, e, r, ker, baker." Rail- 
way trains go scurrying along. The locomotive 
has brought the world to the wilderness, and took 
back for ''return freight" the wilderness to the 
world. The old trick of the clouds and the sun- 
shine has been played again. There are sweeps 
of ripened grain upon the slopes. There are 
orchards that are not oaks. 



\ 

PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS. 45 



CHAPTER VI. 



PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS. 

They have discovered that our next-door neigh- 
bor, the moon, is about the temperature of boil- 
ing water. What a splendid locomotive was 
spoiled just to make a moon ! Those of us who 
are forty years old have been spending the last 
twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded 
us to believe in the first ten. No Great Afri- 
can Desert. No Great American Desert. No 
giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No Wil- 
liam Tell, no apple, no target practice. " G. 
Washington" never had a hatchet. No Mael- 
strom off the Norwegian coast. No White Nile 
mystery. Homer never wrote Homer, nor Ossian 
Ossian. There are two things, two blessed doubts, 
that we know as little about as we ever did, to- 
wit : Who wrote the Letters of Junius ? and Is 
there an open Polar Sea ? I sincerely hope they 
will never find out. 

The locomotive is aggressive. It assaults and 
captures and tames the wilderness. You are a 



46 THE WORLD ON IV II EELS. 

passenger on the Missouri, Kansas and , Texas 
Railway, that can swing you down through Mis- 
souri and the Indian Territory and Texas to the 
Gulf of Mexico. You embark at Sedalia, the 
most vigorous inland town in Missouri except 
Kansas City. The cars are as elegant as any in 
America, the track smooth to a wonder, and 
altogether the perfection of locomotive civiliza- 
tion. Away you glide. Fort Scott is passed, and 
the train begins to show queer characteristics. 
The men that get aboard are leaner and longer, 
with a swinging stride like so many panthers. 
They carry brown rifles, they are girt about with 
a small armament of revolvers. They are in full 
blossom as to the brims of their hats, like sun- 
flowers. They talk deer, horse, bear, turkey. 
They brevet you, and you become captain or 
colonel by the breath of their mouths, which is 
tobacco. There are sleepy-looking dogs in the 
baggage-car, with ears like little leather aprons. 
You see more flat women in sunbonnets than you 
ever saw before in one place. Three or four exag- 
gerated creatures lie in a heap in a corner. They 
are the half-way station between a large rabbit 
and a small donkey. They are ears with bodies 
to them. It is your first sight of a buck-rabbit. 
You hear border talk and see border manners, 
in cars finished to the last touch of pier-glass 
polish. You look up, and lo, a Cherokee at your 



PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS. 47 

elbow ! There he stands, as if a fresh creation, 
and positively his first appearance anywhere. His 
eyes, like black beads suddenly struck with in- 
telligence, had taken you all in before you saw 
him at all. You begin to realize where you are 
— that old Fort Holmes is at your right and 
Little Rock at your left ; that you are in a 
country with such places in it as Elk City, 
Panther, Yellville, Crockett and Waxahatchie. 

Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and 
Santa Fe Railway. You land at Emporia, Kansas, 
one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas 
City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in pan- 
oply as glittering as anywhere. You find a brisk 
and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant houses, 
capital schools, a public library, and intelligent 
and hospitable people. The railroad was Pha- 
raoh's daughter to it. It found the little Moses 
in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in 
the wilderness. You see last week's New York 
fashions in the streets, the latest works of litera- 
ture upon the tables. The pretty dining-room 
girl startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buf- 
falo-steak or antelope?" You regard her in a 
dazed way, and ask "What?" " Buffalo - steak 
or antelope?" and you say "Both!" A citizen, 
on hospitable thoughts intent, promises to take 
you out antelope -hunting. You faintly enquire 
"Where?" and the reply is, " O, ten or a dozen 



48 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

miles ! " You begin to understand things, and to 
see that the locomotive is trailing civilization 
along after it wherever it goes. 

Again on the train: A man enters the car who 
toes straight out the way he is going. He has a red 
sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his waist. 
The glitter of a silver - mounted revolver at his 
left side, a shady sombrero upon his head, an un- 
civilized nugget of gold for a breastpin, a small 
log -chain of the same material a -swing upon his 
breast, buttons up and down the side seams of 
his pantaloons, square-shouldered, broader at the 
breast than equatorially. There you have him, 
and isn't he cool? He gives you a square look 
with both eyes. He seats himself upon the crim- 
son cushions as indifferently as if he had never 
seen anything else. It is an American turned 
into a Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday 
clothes, and bound for St. Louis. He is at home 
on horseback, is at home any where, and can 
throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple 
out of one pocket, a desperate-looking knife out 
of another ; a little jerk of the wrist, and about 
eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at 
you a second, and — carves his apple! Then that 
cutlery becomes a toothpick of the Arkansas 
patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker. 

I should like to see the railroad-hog, a variety 
in the animal kingdom of which there is some- 



PLUNGING INTO THE WILDERNESS. 49 

thing to be said by-and-by, get his seat while 
he is in the baggage-car taking a smoke. If 
carved ox is beef, and manufactured calf is veal, 
that hog would be in danger of turning into 
pork. Though the herder is quiet, civil, self- 
reliant, yet he is a peripatetic Bill of Rights. 
He is his own Legislature, and the first law is 
self-defence. He answers your questions in a 
quaint, sententious way. He will tell you that 
a great herd of those Southwestern cattle look 
like a drove of horns with legs and tails to 
them ; that they all think a man has four feet, 
and is half horse. They seldom see him except 
mounted, and when they do, that man must make 
" a right smart " use of the two feet he has left, 
to escape being gored and trampled to death. 
Those illogical cattle have no idea of the con- 
crete. The herder loves the free life, the swift 
motion, the abundant air, and the elbow-room of 
the plains. He has not taken as much medicine 
as you can put on a knife-blade in eight years. 
When he is "under the weather," he just curls 
down somewhere, and sleeps it off like a dog. 

•Yonder are a couple of rough men, with North- 
easterly voices, and shaggy about the head as a 
couple of buffaloes. They have just come in from 
killing two hundred of those " cattle upon a 
thousand hills." They think they are hunters. 
They are unacquainted with Webster, and miss 



50 THE WORLD OX WHEELS. 

the right word, for they arc unlicensed butchers, 
and ought to be punished. They had slain the 
two hundred for their tongues alone, and left the 
great carcasses a reckless waste upon the plains. 
If those fellows could only have an Egyptian 
"lean year" all to themselves, I should like to 
put them on a strictly vegetable diet, and turn 
them out to graze with Nebuchadnezzar. Such 
touches of border-life give a Far Western train a 
character of its own that is by no means un- 
pleasant. You feel something as you did when 
you entered the National Conservatory at Wash- 
ington, breathed the scented air of the home- 
made tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and 
waited a minute for an elephant to come out. 

But let nobody think that the world on wheels 
in Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and the Plains essen- 
tially differs from the same world trundling about 
in New England. Equal courtesy, heartier cordi- 
ality, just as much intelligence as characterize the 
route from New York to Boston. Writing of 
Boston : A certain publishing house in that city 
once sent a letter to a Chicago citizen, and a 
man to bring it, asking for a list of those places 
in the West where the people would be " up to 
their publications," for that is the wa}^ they put 
it. The Chicago citizen referred them to a great 
tat Gazetteer, and the inquisition ended. 



VICIOUS ANIMALS. 51 



CHAPTER VII. 



VICIOUS ANIMALS. 



A great many animals get on board first-class 
passenger trains that should have been shipped 
in box-cars, with sliding doors on the sides. 
There is your Railway Hog — the man who takes 
two seats, turns them vis-a-vis, and makes a 
letter X of himself, so as to keej} them all. 
Meanwhile, women, old enough to be his mother, 
pass feebly along the crowded car, vainly seek- 
ing a seat, but he gives a threatening grunt, and 
they timidly look the other way. He is gener- 
ally rotund as to voice and person, well-fed, but 
not well-bred. Not always, however. I have 
seen a meek-faced man, as thin and pale as an 
ivory paper-cutter, who looked as if he had just 
gone with the consumption, who made an X of 
himself, as if he were the displayed emblem of 
porcine starvation. Have you ever thought of 
taking up burglary for a livelihood ? Be a burg- 
lar if you must, but a Railway Hog never ! Had 
the ancestors of this type of creature only been 



52 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

among the herd that ran down that " steep 
place into the sea," what a comfort it would 
have been ! 

Did you ever see the Bouncers ? They are 
young, they are girls, they always go in pairs, 
and they bring a breeze. Like the man whose 
voice in secret prayer could be heard throughout 
the neighborhood, they discuss private affairs in 
a public manner. They throw scraps of loud, 
laughing talk at you much as if they were eat- 
ing a luncheon. It is November. The wind 
comes out of the keen North. Be-shawled, be- 
cloaked, be-furred, never laying off fur or feather, 
they open the windows with a bounce, and there 
they sit snug as Russian bears, and the wind 
blowing full upon you seated just behind. You 
venture to beg, after freezing through, that they 
will close the windows and let you come to a 
thaw. What a word " supercilious " is, to be 
sure ! Up go their two pairs of eyebrows, and 
down come the windows, both with a bounce. 
Then they grow sultry, and one whisks off "a 
cloud" or something square in your eyes, and 
the other flings back her fur cape on to the top 
of your head, sees what she has done, brushes 
the garment a little, and says nothing — to you. 
The train halts at some station. Up go the 
windows and out the two heads, and a rattling 
fire of talk is exchanged with more Bouncers on 



VICIOUS ANIMALS. 53 

the platform — all loud, talk and talkers, as a 
scarlet vest and a saffron neck-tie. By-and-by 
they fall to fixing their back-hair, smoothing their 
eyebrows with a licked finger, and making other 
preparations to leave the poor company they have 
managed to get into. 

Lest they be forgotten, let me impound cer- 
tain offending people in a few paragraphs just 
here, that, like that place in the Valley of Hin- 
nom, shall be a sort of Railway Travelers' Tophet. 
Capital punishment should not be abolished until 
they have all been executed at least once: 

The man whose salivary glands are the most 
active part of him, who spits on your side of the 
aisle when you are not looking, and spoils the 
lady's dress who occupies the seat after him. 

The man who puts a pair of feet, guiltless of 
water as a dromedary's, upon the back of your 
seat, and wants you to beg his pardon for being 
so near them. 

The man who eats Switzer cheese, onions and 
sausages from over the sea, in the night time. 

The man who prowls from car to car, and 
leaves the doors wide open in the winter time. 

The boy who pulls the distracted accordeon 
by the tail, he having several mothers and six 
small sisters to feed, and then wishes you to pay 
him something for " cruelty to animals." 

The boy who throws prize packages of impo- 



54 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

sition at you, and insists you shall buy the 
"Banditti of the Prairie," or the tw Life of Ellen 
Jewett," or the pictorial edition of the Walworth 
Family, or a needlebook, or a bag of popped 
corn, or some vegetable ivory, and wakes you 
out of a pleasant doze to see if you wouldn't 
like a Railroad guide. 

The man who, with a metallic voice, in which 
brass is as plain as a brass knuckle, does the 
wit for the car ; who tells the train - boy he '11 
get his growth before the train gets through ; 
who talks of stepping off to pick whortleberries, 
and then stepping on again; who says that 
orders have been issued to the engineer never 
to heat the water hot enough to scald anybody ; 
who talks in the night, and makes it hideous. 
There is no apparent reason why this man may 
not be made shorter by a head immediately. 
Let him be guillotined. " Brevity is the soul of 
wit.'' 

What shall we do with her? — the woman who 
sails through the crowded car, and brings to 
beside you like a monument, looks as if you had 
no business to be born without her consent, and 
says in a clear, incisive voice, that cuts you like 
a knife, " I know a gentleman when I see him ! " 
Is there a needle or something in the cushion? 
You are seventy, and have the rheumatism. She 
is twenty-five, full of strength and health, and 



VICIOUS ANIMALS. DO 

with a pair of supporters of her own as sturdy 
as the legs of a piano. But what can you do? 
You feel red, and draw your head into your 
coat-collar like a modest and retiring mud-turtle, 
and pretend not to hear. Bat there she stands, 
and a young fellow across the way with a sky- 
blue necktie just lighted under his chin, laughs 
out loud at the situation, and you think, as 
pretty much all the blood you have, has gone 
into your head and ears, you will go and warm 
your feet. So you get up, with joints creaking 
like a gate, and hobble to the stove, where you 
stand and bow to the stove-pipe in an extra- 
ordinary way, and catch it around the waist now 
and then, and all the while she sits in your 
place like a fallen angel. " What shall we do 
with her?" Send her to the tailor to be meas- 
ured, and "let her pass for a man!" 

Everybody has met the man on a railway train 
who, as no one ever learned his name because 
no one ever cared to, may be designated as 
"Might IP" with a rising slide. All sorts of a 
man to look at, he is but one sort of a man to 
encounter, to - wit : an animated cork-screw, for- 
ever trying to pull the cork from the bottle of 
your personal identity. "Might I?" begins his 
acquaintance by stealing; stealing a look at you 
out of the tail of his eye, the meanest kind of 
pilfering, though the law does n't mention it. 



51 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Then he begins upon you. He says, " Might I 
ask how far you are traveling ? Might I inquire 
what business you follow ? Might I inquire if 
you are married? Might I ask your name?" 
His talk is as lively as a mite-y cheese, and he 
assaults you like the New England Catechism. 
This man has been growled at, snapped at, re- 
quested to go beyond the possible limit of frost, 
but he cuts and comes again the very first oppor- 
tunity. " Might I?" has never been put to death 
by anybody. The remedy could be tried once, 
and if it failed to quiet, and only killed him, 
we should know better than to try it again. 

The Railway Opossum is not vicious but he is 
amusing. He enters a car that is rapidly rilling, 
drops into a whole seat, adjusts his blanket, 
chucks his soft hat under his head, swings up his 
feet to a horizontal — all this in two minutes — 
and is asleep ! Objurgations fall upon him like 
the sweet rain. Shakes fail to disturb him, and 
no one ever tried Shakespeare. Tender women 
passing by say, " O, he 7 s asleep — perhaps worn 
out Avith long travel ; " and not till that swarm 
settles, and he thinks himself sure of his elbow- 
room, does he open an eye and " come to," and 
grow as lively as opossums ever get. 

They board the train — they two — he in white 
gloves, new clothes, and a white satin necktie; 
she in a lavender silk, a bridal hat, and a small 



VICIOUS ANIMALS. 57 

blush. Seated, they incline towards each other 
like the slanting side-pieces of the letter A. He 
throws one arm around her, and she reclines on 
his shoulder like a lily-pad. They whisper, they 
giggle, they talk low, they contemplate each other 
like a couple of china cats on a mantle-piece. He 
takes a gentle pinch of her cheek as if she were 
maccaboy, when she is only a very verdant girl. 
She sits with her hand in his, like a mourner 
at a funeral — the funeral of propriety. They 
punctuate their twitter of talk with pouncing 
kisses. They fly at each other like a brace of 
humming-birds. The sun shines. The car is 
filled with strangers. They are the target for 
thirty pairs of eyes. They smell of cologne or 
patchouly or — musquashes! They are the sor- 
ghum of the honeymoon — saccharine lunatics, 
and there they are — turned loose upon the public ! 

The Union Pacific Company has made provi- 
sion to shut such people up. They have just 
begun to run a lunatic asylum with every San 
Francisco train, but they give it an astronomical 
name. They call it a " honeymoon car." The 
Company deserves well of the public for keeping 
traveling idiots out of sight. In certain circum- 
stances it is difficult for some people to avoid 
being fools. 

The ? that wears clothes, and goes away from 
home by the cars, and afflicts the conductor and 



58 ////. WORLD ON WHEELS. 

the brakeman and his traveling companions — he 
is of recent origin. There is no account of him 
in Job. The Patriarch had a great many uncom- 
fortable things, but he did n't have Mm. Had 
he been let loose upon Pharaoh, that stiff-necked 
Egyptian would have "let the people go" be- 
fore breakfast. His natural diet is conductors 
and brakemen, but he will not refuse anybody. 
He has told the man before him and the woman 
behind him where he wants to go, and shown 
his ticket and his trunk check, and asked if this 
is the right train, and if the check is good, and 
when he will get there, and how far it is, and 
whether he knows anybody there. His victim 
pronounces the check genuine, gets out his 
" Guide," hunts up the place, ascertains the 
distance, tells him the time, and doesn't know 
anybody there. 

The conductor enters, collecting tickets and 
fare, has a heavy train, and it is only five miles 
to the first station. ? makes for him on sight, 
tries to get him by the collar or button or elbow, 
and tells him where he wants to go, and shows 
his check, and inquires if this is the right train, 
and when he will get there, and how far it is. 
The conductor answers him, nips a spiteful nick 
out of his ticket, and hurries on. ? returns to 
his seat, and watches for a brakeman. Him he 
catches by the coat-tail, and he asks him if he 



VI CIO US A NIMA LS. 59 

is on the right train, and if the check is good, 
and if he thinks his baggage is aboard, and when 
he will get there, and how far it is. The brake- 
man has seen him before, and his replies are 
too short for a weak stomach, but he tells him. 

The last morsel finished, he turns to you, and 
he says, as a woman who deliberates and is 
therefore lost, " I think now I am on the wrong 
train. I thought so all the while," and then 
he tells you where he wants to go, and shows 
you his check, and asks you if you think it is 
good for the trunk, and how far it is, and when 
he will get there, and you tell him. The con- 
ductor returns, he makes a grab at him, and he 
wants him to tell him when he will get there, 
and who keeps the best house, and how far it 
is from the depot, and whether that is really the 
best house or some other, and whether he meant 
three o'clock in the forenoon or afternoon, and 
the conductor does n't tell him. 



60 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER VIII. 



HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN. 

A locomotive has two habits. It drinks and 
it smokes. It seems to take comfort in drinking 
at a liberal river, rather than where the draught 
is trickled out to it through a stingy pipe on a 
dry prairie. Climbing heavy grades involves hard 
drinking. On the Mount Washington Railway, 
where you travel a mile and rise nineteen hun- 
dred feet in an hour and half, the thirsty engine 
disposes of eighteen hundred gallons of water — 
all dissipated in breath. 

During the late war they often watered engines 
from pails, as they would ponies. Perhaps you 
have sat upon a bank, not of thyme but of time, 
at midnight, in Tennessee, with suspicious cedars 
all about within hailing distance — trees that often 
shed queer fruit in a vigorous way — waiting for 
the train-men to bring locomotive refreshments of 
light wood and pails of water. Never since then 
has the smoke of an engine been welcome, but 
often, in those times when the nights were " un- 
ruly," would the burning red cedar load the air 



HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN. 61 

with a suspicion of sweet incense that was really 
grateful. Possibly it was associated with the per- 
fume of the cedar bows of boyhood, when ihe 
flight of one's own arrow, sped from the spring- 
ing wood, was grander than any flight of elo- 
quence the archer has heard since. To - day, a 
whiff of cedar will carry you faster and farther 
than a swift engine. It will take almost any half- 
century-old boy back to the era of blue-striped 
trousers and roundabouts, and girls with white 
pantalettes gathered at the bottom ; to the time 
when bow and arrow, windmill and kite, jack- 
knife, fishhooks and tops, " two old cat," Satur- 
day afternoons and training-days were so many 
letters in the alphabet of happiness, and he will 
not be a bit worse for the trip, but younger, 
gentler and more human. 

Writing of boys : till the writer was sixteen 
years old he never saw a deacon, that he couldn't 
tell him as quick as he could a squirrel. Some- 
times they were tall and thin, but often stout, and 
as the papers have it, "prominent members of 
society" — measured from the second vest button 
to the small of the back ! But they were always 
gray, and sometimes venerable. He used to won- 
der if they were born old, and the idea of a young 
deacon was impossible. The locomotive has hur- 
ried up these useful- servants of the church, so 
that they are sometimes picked before they are 
quite ripe, and sent forward by an early train. 



62 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Take a sleek, dark - haired, flare - vested, civet- 
Bcented, slim - waisted man in a cut-away, and 
suit cliing his patent -leathers with a ratan, and 
vmi have a deacon that would puzzle Wilderness 
John, as Agassiz never was puzzled by a new 
specimen of natural history. But he may be a 
capital deacon for all that, only in disguise. 

The more you travel, the less you carry. The 
novice begins with two trunks, a valise, a hat- 
box and an umbrella. He jingles with checks. 
He haunts the baggage-car like a " perturbed 
spirit." He ends with a small knapsack, an over- 
coat and a linen duster. *Bosom, collar, wrist- 
bands, he does himself up in paper like a curl. 
He is as clean round the edges as the margins 
of a new book. 

We throw away a great deal of baggage on 
the life journey that we cannot well spare ; a 
young heart, bright recollections of childhood, 
friends of the years that are gone. And so we 
"fly light," but we do not fly well. 

Let us approach the baggage-man with tender- 
ness. Let us tender him a quarter, if he in turn 
will give quarter to our trunk. He is square- 
built and broad-shouldered. His vigorous exer- 
cise in throwing things has developed his mus- 
cles till he projects like a catapult. It is pleas- 
ant to watch his playful ways, provided you carry 
your baggage in your hat. He waltzes out a 
preat trunk on its corners till thev are as doer- 



HABITS OF EA'GIXES AND TRAIN MEN. 



S3 



eared as a school reader. He keeps carpet-bags 
in the air like a juggler. While one is going 
up another is coming down. Hinges of trunks 
give way. There is a smell of camphor and 




THE BAGGAGE SMASHER. 



paregoric, and a jingle of glass, and a display 
of woman's apparel. They are all bundled up 
like an armful of fodder, and thrust hack into 
the offending trunk, and a big word is tumbled 
in after them — to keep things down. 

Meanwhile, the tremendous voice of the check- 



64 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

master tolls like a bell, "4689 Cleveland! 271 
Rochester ! " and the baggage - car is as lively 
with all sorts of baggage as corn in a corn- 
popper. Things that are marked, " this side up 
with care ! " come down bottom-side up, like cap- 
t u red mud-turtles. They go end over end, like 
acrobats. A rope is stretched around the place of 
destruction, to keep the crowd that is watching 
the entertainment from being killed. This has 
always seemed to me a very touching instance 
of the loving kindness of railway officials, and 
yet it is possible a spare end of that same rope 
might be used in a pleasant way to diversify 
the performances about that baggage-car. They 
have — I hope he is yet alive — a model bag- 
gage-man on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy 
Railroad. He is very feeble. Once he was the 
champion ground-tumbler of the West, but now 
he has the galloping consumption. He is a mel- 
ancholy spectacle, but he is a model of his kind. 
The baggage moves quietly about him, and yet 
the transfer is made rapidly and on time. There 
is only one thing that prevents his promotion — 
his being made inspector of baggage-men through- 
out the country, with a commission to travel 
and visit them all. It is this : quick consump- 
tion is not contagious. Not one of his subor- 
dinates could possibly catch it. 

Sometimes a train in an accountable way has 



HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN. DO 

a characteristic. Were you ever passenger on 
the Inarticulate Train ? The conductor enters 
the car, closes the door with a confused bang, 
and, his little tongs swinging on a finger in an 
airy way, he shouts " Tix ! " The train-boy 
coasts along behind him, and he says, "Ap ! 
Pape ! Norangz ! " The brake man pops his head 
in at the door, shows you the top of his cap, 
and roars down into his manly bosom, " Tledr ! " 
just as you are pulling into that misplaced Cas- 
tilian city, in the region where, according to the 
old song, 

" Potatoes they grow small in Maumee ! " 

The very wheels beneath you trundle along 
in an indistinct fashion, and the engine has a 
wheeze instead of a whistle. It is as if the 
railway dictionary had been run over by the cars 
a number of times, and there was nothing left 
for the owners but to serve out the fragments 
to passengers. The brakeman of a train holds, 
all things considered, the post of honor, because 
the post of danger. The locomotive talks to 
him all day, and, as a rule, that is about the 
only individual with whom he holds much con- 
versation. It says "Hold her!" and round goes 
the wheel. " Danger ! " and he springs to it with 
a will. "Ease her!" and off comes the brake 
with a clank. " Now I 'm going to start ! " 



lit') THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

^ Now I'm going to back!" "Off the track! 
Off the track ! " " Coming to bridge ! " "I see 
the town!" " Open the s-w-i-t-c-h ! " and, 
through all, the brakeman stands by like a helms- 
man in a storm. On lightning trains he is not 
given to much humor, but the article is in him. 
As you cross Iowa by the Chicago and North- 
western Railway, and approach the great Divide, 
the stations run : East Side — Tip-Top — West 
Side. The route through that region is a little 
monotonous. It is the hammer, hammer, hammer 
of the wheels in anvil cadence hour after hour. 
Between cat-naps, small enough to be kittens, you 
see the great swells of prairie, and then more 
prairie. But there is a brakeman on one of the 
trains that can enliven you a little, and always 
brings up a smile like a glimmer of sunshine. He 
says "East Side!" or "West Side!" stupidly 
enough, but when the train is just halting at the 
pinnacle, he throws a hearty elation and a double 
circumflex into his tone, much as if you had 
asked him what sort of time he had at the great 
Railroad Ball, and he cries " Tip-Top ! " That 
inflection of his always tells. 

There is a poor joke, past the grace of salt- 
petre, that an economical conductor will save a 
few hundred dollars a year more than his sal- 
ary; and there is an impression abroad in many 
minds that conductors take to stealing as Do£- 



HABITS OF ENGINES AND TRAIN MEN. 67 

berry got his reading and writing — naturally. 
When it comes to that, a couple of railway 
directors and a president or two have been 
known to steal more money than all the con- 
ductors in the United States together ever mis- 
appropriated. A conductor, if dishonest, is not 
a rogue because he is a conductor, or a con- 
ductor because he is a rogue. As a class, con- 
ductors are as honorable as lawyers, physicians, 
bankers, while they run far greater risks, and 
have far more to try their patience, than the 
money-changers and professional gentlemen just 
named. Go from Providence to the Golden Gate, 
and, as a rule, it is the conductors who treat 
you with the most courtesy and kindness, step 
aside from the line of their official duty to gratify 
your reasonable wishes and render you comfort- 
able. And not for you only, but for the hun- 
dreds of thousands of strangers who ride upon 
their trains. 

To them, generations of men and women only 
live fiom eighteen to twenty-four hours. They 
pass on, and are seen no more. But during 
those hours the conductor has human nature 
under a microscope. He discovers things about 
people that they themselves had only guessed 
at. He discerns traits that their neighbors never 
detected. The average conductor is a shrewd 
man. He reads faces like a book, and remem- 
bers them always. 



(J8 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER IX. 



IN THE SADDLE. 



The engineer and the brakeman are as often 
f:nd as truly heroes as the average veteran army 
colonel under fire for the tenth time. True cour- 
age, thoughtful kindness, presence of mind, and a 
quiet bearing, form a four-stranded quality that is 
never quite perfect if unraveled. How have they 
all been illustrated ! Take the hero of New- 
Hamburg, on the Hudson River Road, who looked 
death in the face, and never left the saddle. 
Take the dying engineer immortalized by the poet 
of Amesbury, who used the last of his ebbing 
breath to make sure the coming train was sig- 
nalled. Take incidents chinked into the papers 
every day in little type, that, pertaining to men 
without shoulder-straps or title, are read with a 
passing glance, and then forgotten. 

The locomotive engineer is as quiet as a Qua- 
ker meeting. One driver of a four-horse coach 
will make more noise than a dozen of him. 
There he is with his hand upon the iron lever, 



IN THE SADDLE. 69 

and looks forth from his little window. If he 
wants to say something confidentially to a street 
crossing, there is the bell-tongue. If he wishes to 
throw a word or two back to the brakeman, or 
make a short speech to a distant depot, there is 
the whistle. He pats his engine, and calls it 
" she." Its name is Whirling Cloud or Rolling 
Thunder or Vampire or Vanderbilt, but it is 
" she" all the time. He knows her ways, and she 
understands his. He loves to see her brazen 
trappings shine ; to watch the play of her polished 
arms ; to let her out on a straight shoot ; to make 
time. 

Put your foot in the stirrup and swing yourself 
aboard. The engineer's little cabin is a regular 
houdah for an elephant. It is a princely way 
of making a royal progress. The engineer bids 
you take that cushioned seat by the right-hand 
window. You hear the gurgle of the engine's 
feverish pulse, and the hiss of a whole community 
of tea-kettles. There is his steam-clock with its 
finger on the figure. There is his time-clock. 
One says, sixty pounds. The other, forty miles an 
hour. A little bell on the wall before him 
strikes. That was the conductor. He said " Pull 
out," and he pulls. The brazen bell, like a gob- 
let wrong side up, spills out a great clangor. 
The whistle gives two sharp, quick notes. The 
driver swings back the lever. The engine's slen- 



',0 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

der arms begin to feel slowly in her cylindrical 
pockets for something they never find, and never 
tire of feeling for. Great unwashed fleeces are 
counted slowly out from the smoke-stack. The 
furnace doors open and shut faster and faster. 
The faces of the * clock dials shine in the bursts 
of light like newly-washed school-children's that 
have been polished off with a crash towel. The 
lever is swung a little farther down. The search 
for things gets lively. Fleeces are getting plen- 
tier. The coal goes into the furnace and out 
at the chimney like the beat of a great black 
artery. There is a brisk breeze that makes your 
hair stream like a comet's. 

The locomotive is alive with reserved power. 
It has a sentient tremor as it hugs the track, 
and hurls itself along sixty feet for every tick 
of the clock — as if you should walk twenty 
paces while your heart beats once ! First you 
get the idea, and next the exhilaration, of power 
in motion. It is better than " the Sillery soft 
and creamy," of Longfellow. It is finer than 
sparkling Catawba. It has the touch of wings 
in it. You watch the track, and you learn some- 
thing. You had always supposed the iron bars 
were laid in two parallel lines. But you see ! 
It is a long slender V, tapering to a point in 
the distance ! But the engine pries them apart 
as it plunges on, and makes a track of them. 



IN THE SADDLE. 71 

The locomotive quickens your pulse, but it does 
more. It quickens vegetation, and makes things 
light and frisky. See that little bush squat to 
the ground, like a hare in her form. It grows 
before your eyes. It is a big bush, a little tree, 
a full-grown maple, that gave down the sap for 
the sugar-camp kettle in your grandfather's time. 
There are a couple of portly hay-stacks, like two 
Dutch burghers of the Knickerbocker days, grow- 
ing fatter every minute, and waddling out of the 
way to let the train go by. 

Two miles ago, a strolling farm-house stood in 
the middle of the road, staring stupidly down 
the track. It has just got over the fence into 
the lot, behind some shrubs and flowers and 
pleasant trees, and looks, as you fly by, as if 
it had never moved at all. Apparently, really, 
always, there is magic in the Locomotive. 

There is a picture of the first railroad train in 
the State of New York. It was taken by a 
man with no hands. Their proverbial cunning 
had slipped down into his toes.. The faces of 
the passengers are portraits. One of them is the 
venerable Thuklow Weed, of New York. The 
car is strictly a coach. They call a. sixty-soul 
car a coach now. It is a vicious misuse, for a 
railway-car is as much like a coach as a rope- 
walk is like a German flute. The vehicle is 
bodied like a coach, backed like a coach, doored 



, 2 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Like a coach, and has a little railing around the 
roof to keep the baggage from going ■ overboard. 
And there is baggage. It is not a carpet-bag, 
nor a valise, nor a Saratoga, but a leather port- 
manteau, an Old World cloak-carrier. There may 
be a pair of flapped saddle-bags under somebody's 
feet inside. Modern satchels were not. 

There are three seats, and Mr. Weed sits upon 
the middle one. Before this coach is the engine. 
The cylinder is trained like a Washington gun, 
at an angle of about thirty -three and a third 
degrees, and seems to have gotten the range 
pretty accurately of the engineer's head. The 
engineer has no house, no seat, but stands upon 
a platform much like a man about to be hanged. 
A wine-cask, small at both ends and big in the 
middle, is perched on end within easy reach, 
filled with oven - wood ; to - wit, wood split axe- 
helve size, such as our fathers were wont to 
manufacture for heating the egg-shaped brick 
oven on baking days. With this fuel he pro- 
vokes the patient water to boiling point. No 
bell, no whistle, no means of communicating with 
him, except the conductor catches him by the 
coat-skirt. 

The conductor is a "captain." He has more 
dignity than a modern railway superintendent. 
They go ten miles an hour, and they do well. 
Being in the picture business, I may as well 



IN THE SADDLE. 73 

say that the Harpers once presented a picture 
of an old-time iron tea-kettle, with a crooked 
spout and a jingling lid. I saw it jingle, and 
that 's direct testimony. From the vexed spout 
rolled little volumes of steam. Below it was 
the portrait of a great locomotive, all ready to 
run. The twain were relatives, for the tea-kettle 
was the shriveled, far away, nasal grandfather 
of the engine, and beneath it were the words, 
"In the beginning." That told the story, as 
far as the story had gone. These bits of fine art 
are suggestive. They mean that Ave have made 
wonderful progress in the art of being common 
carriers, and that one-half the world must keep 
very busy in thinking things and doing things 
worth transporting by the other half. It is an 
axiom that no city can achieve permanent pros- 
perity simply by an immense carrying trade. 
How about the world ? 



10 



74 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER X. 



RACING AND PLOWING. 

Two rates of motion are racing and plowing, 
but, as you shall see, wonderfully alike. An 
Agricultural Fair has come to mean a Race- 
Track with a variety of vegetables ranged around 
on the outside, and a great crowd between the 
ring of track and the ring of vegetables. There 
appears to be much doubt as to the propriety 
of horse-races, but I have never seen a consci- 
entious man who happened by chance to witness 
a race, that did not make up his mind in a 
minute which horse he wanted to be the win- 
ner. He did not believe in that kind of four- 
footed gambling, but then . You tell him 

the gray will be whipped — gray is his color — 
and he wants to back up his opinion with some- 
thing — let you know what that judgment is 
worth to him ; and were it not for some re- 
straining grace, he would produce his pocketbook 
and flourish the estimated value of his opinion 
full in vour face. 



RACING AND PLOWING. 75 

That 's the way betting comes. It is not a 
mere invention, like a Yankee nutmeg. It is 
human nature. One man argues, another sneers, 
a third gets angry, a fourth fights, and a fifth 
bets. Five ways of doing the same thing. The 
writer knew a young man— not so young as he 
was — who happened to be in New York when 
the great running-race between Fashion and Pey- 
tona occurred on the Union Course, Long Island. 
That individual, boy and man, never saw but 
that one race, never played a game of cards, or 
bet a penny upon anything ; but no sooner were 
the horses brought up to the Grand Stand than 
he had his favorite, and he could not have told 
why, to save his life. He would have endowed 
that horse's prospect of winning with all his 
earthly possessions, which were twenty-seven dol- 
lars and a half, if he could have found a taker 
to accept of such a trifle. How he watched 
every jump the creature made ! How he admired 
her as she flew close to the ground from land- 
ing-place to landing-place again, and clapped his 
hands and cheered like a maniac ! He was a 
full-grown sporting-man in a minute, though he 
did not know a horse's hock from the Rhenish 
wine of that name. 

Now to put the race upon wheels instead of 
heels : the tracks of those two great lines of 
travel, the Michigan Southern and the Pittsburg 



7 b' THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

& Fort Wayne, run side by side for several 
miles after they leave Chicago — sometimes so 
near that you can toss an apple from one train 
to the other. When the workmen laid the tracks 
they thought about the races, for they knew that 
races must come from such a neighborhood of 
railways, and each gang shouted across to the 
other, and bet on its own road. 

They did come. You are on the Michigan 
Southern. The train has worked slowly out of 
the city on to the open prairie. The Pittsburg 
train has done the same thing. There at your 
right, and half a mile away, you can see the 
puffs of white steam. The trembling clangor of 
the bell has ceased. The shackly-jointed gait of 
the train ceases. It tightens up, and runs with 
a humming sound. The landscape slips out from 
under your feet like a skipping-rope. Pittsburg 
is coming. She laps the last car of your train. 
Now is your time to run alongside, and see how 
an engine acts when the throttle-valve is wide 
open. Watch the flash of that steel arm as it 
brings the wheels about. She is doing her best. 
The two engines are neck and neck. They 
scream at each other like Camanches. The bells 
clang. The trains are running forty-five miles 
an hour. It is a small inspiration. 

Now for the passengers. The windows are 
open. Heads out, handkerchiefs waving. Every- 



RACING AND PLOWING. I I 

body alive. Everybody anxious. Nobody afraid. 
Rivalry has run away from fear. Our engineer 
puts on a little more speed. The train draws 
slowly out from the even race, like the tube of 
a telescope. It is the poetry of motion — power 
spurning the ground without leaving it. Good- 
by, palaces ! good-by, coaches ! good-b}% baggage- 
cars ! good-by, engine ! good-by, Pittsburg ! We 
have shown that train a clean pair of heels. 
There is nothing left of it but black and white 
plumes of steam and smoke. Look around you. 
The car is all smiles and congratulations. 
44 Grave and gay," they are as lively as a nest 
of winning gamblers. 

This racing is all wrong. Superintendents have 
forbidden it, travelers have denounced it, but 
they want to see what can be gotten out of 
44 Achilles " or " Whirling Thunder," as much as 
anybody. And they do not want to be beat! 
Make them engineers, and every man of them 
would pull out and put things through their 
best paces. We believe in horses, we believe in 
locomotives, but we lack faith in balloons. They 
are large toys for big children. " The earth 
hath bubbles as the water has, and these are 
of them." 

Old Nantucket salts used to spin their fireside 
yarns about doubling the Cape. There was such 
a mingling of peril and excitement ; the foamy 



78 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

seas boarding the ship by the bows ; the fly- 
ing rack ; the visible storm ; the orders lost in 
the thunder of the waves, or swept away by 
the wind ; it was such man's work to get about 
that headland in the Pacific seas, that no won- 
der boys leaped from bedroom windows in the 
night and ran away to try it. I think there is 
one railway experience you may have, that is 
much like going around the Horn. 

Did you ever ride on a snow -plow ? Not the 
pet and pony of a thing that is attached to the 
front of an engine, sometimes, like a pilot, but 
a great two-storied monster of strong timbers, 
that runs upon wheels of its own, and that boys 
run after and stare at, as they would after, and 
at, an elephant. You are snow - bound at Buff- 
alo. The Lake Shore Line is piled with drifts 
like a surf. Two passenger trains have been 
half-buried for twelve hours somewhere in snowy 
Chautauqua. The storm howls like a congrega- 
tion of Arctic bears. But the Superintendent at 
Buffalo is determined to release his castaways 
and clear the road to Erie. He permits you to 
be a passenger on the great snow-plow, and there 
it is, all ready to drive. Harnessed behind it is 
a tandem team of three engines. It does not 
occur to you that you are going to ride upon 
a steam -drill, and so you get aboard. 

Tt is a spacious and timbered room, with one 



RA CING A ND PL WING. 7 9 

large bull's-eye window — an overgrown lens. 
The thing is a sort of Cyclops. There are ropes 
and chains and a windlass. There is a bell by 
which the engineer of the first engine can signal 
the plowman, and a cord whereby the plowman 
can talk back. There are two sweeps or arms, 
worked by machinery on the sides. You ask 
their use, and the Superintendent replies, " when, 
in a violent shock, there is danger of the mon- 
ster's upsetting, an arm is put out on one side 
or the other, to keep the thing from turning a 
complete somerset." You get one idea, and an 
inkling of another. So you take out your Acci- 
dent Policy for three thousand dollars, and ex- 
amine it. It never mentions battles nor duels 
nor snow-plows. It names " public conveyances." 
Is a snow-plow a public conveyance ? You are 
inclined to think it is neither that, nor any 
other kind that you should trust yourself to, 
but it is too late for consideration. 

You roll out of Buffalo in the teeth of the wind, 
and the world is turned to snow. All goes mer- 
rily. The machine strikes little drifts, and they 
scurry away in a cloud. The three engines 
breathe easily, but by -and -by the earth seems 
broken into great billows of dazzling white. The 
sun comes out of a cloud, and touches it up 
till it outsilvers Potosi. Houses lie in the trough 
of the sea everywhere, and it requires little 



80 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

imagination to think they are pitching and toss- 
ing before your eyes. The engines' respiration 
is a little quickened. At last there is no more 
road than there is in the Atlantic. A great 
breaker rises right in the way. The monster, 
■with you in it, works its way up and feels of 
it. It is packed like a ledge of marble. Three 
whistles ! The machine backs away and keeps 
backing, as a gymnast runs astern to get sea- 
room and momentum for a big jump ; as a giant 
swings aloft a heavy sledge that it may come 
down with a heavy blow. One whistle ! You 
have come to a halt. Three pairs of whistles 
one after another, and then, putting on all steam, 
you make for the drift. The Superintendent 
locks the door, you do not quite understand why, 
and in a second the battle begins. The machine 
rocks and creaks in all its joints. There comes 
a tremendous shock. The cabin is as dark 
as midnight. The clouds of flying snow put 
out the day. The labored breathing of the lo- 
comotives behind you, the clouds of smoke and 
steam that wrap you as in a mantle, the noon- 
day eclipse of snow, the surging of the ship, 
the rattling of chains, the creak of timbers 
as if the craft were aground, and the sea get- 
ting out of its bed to whelm you altogether, the 
doubt as to what will come next — all combine 
to make a scene of strange excitement for a 



RA CING AND PLO WING. 8 1 

land-lubber. You have made some impression 
upon the breaker, and again the machine backs for 
a fair start, and then altogether another plunge 
and shock and heavy twilight. And so, from 
deep cut to deep cut, as if the season had 
packed all his winter clothes upon the track, 
until the stalled trains are reached and passed, 
and then with alternate storm and calm and halt 
and shock, till the way is cleared to Erie. 

It is Sunday afternoon, and Erie — " Mad An- 
thony Wayne's" old head-quarters — has donned 
its Sunday clothes, and turned out by hundreds 
to see the great plow come in — its first voyage 
over the line. The locomotives set up a crazy 
scream, and you draw slowly into the depot. 
The door opened at last, you clamber down, and 
gaze up at the uneasy house in which you have 
been living. It looks as if an avalanche had 
tumbled down upon it — white as an Alpine 
shoulder. Your first thought is, gratitude that 
you have made a landing alive. Your second, a 
resolution that if again you ride a hammer, it 
will not be when three engines have hold of the 
handle ! 



8J THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XI. 



SNOW-BOUND. 



The law of association is a queer piece of 
legislation. There is the bit of road that used 
to extend from Toledo, where it connected with 
the steamer, stage and canal packet, to Adrian, 
Michigan, where stages took up the broken thread 
and jolted you on towards sunset. That road 
always suggests love-apples to the writer ! Love- 
apples in those days, tomatoes in these. It was 
his first ride upon a railroad ; and, reaching 
Adrian, he for the first time saw and tasted the 
beautiful fruit that, according to the newspapers, 
contains calomel and cancers. Was it a Persian 
pig, or some other, that offered a crown jewel 
for a new dish? Well, here was a new sensa- 
tion, as strange as if the fruit that caused it 
had grown in Ceylon of " the spicy breezes." 
The hands that served them up are dust ; the 
bit of road is lost in the great Lake Shore Line ; 
the hamlet Adrian, with its log-cabin outposts, 
has grown a city with the flare and fashion of 



SNOW-BOUND. 83 

the latter day; but in the perishable tomato 
the memory of that first ride, that broad, burn- 
ing August day, those pleasant friends, is assured 
forever. 

There is the Road to Labrador, known as the 
Rome, Water town & Ogdensburg, that deludes 
you in winter time from modern Rome, in the 
State of New York, and takes you into a world 
snowed clean of every fence and vestige of civ- 
ilization, except houses in white turbans set waist- 
deep in the drifts. By-and-by the engine, with 
strange woodchuck proclivities, falls to burrowing 
in a white bank, and there you wait like a 
precious metal to be digged out. The wind 
gives Alaska howls around the shivering car. 
The stoves comfort themselves with a quiet 
smoke. The passengers scratch eyelet - holes in 
the frosted panes, and see hospitable farmhouses 
within shouting range, but as inaccessible as if 
they had been telescopic objects recently discov- 
ered in the moon. The lazy wood is frying 
with the comforting sound of a speedy meal. 
The brakemen stalk to and fro, and slam the 
doors, and are as talkative as sphinxes. The 
women bend around the departed fire like wil- 
lows around a grave. 

You Avish you had Dr. Kane's "Arctic Explo- 
rations." A perusal of his coldest chapter might 
warm you a little. You get out into the snow, 



84 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

and flounder along to the engine. There it is, 
with its nose in the drift like a setter, and 
sings as feebly as a tea-kettle. The water drips 
through the joints of its harness, and hangs in 
icicles. Did you ever see an icicle grow? Now 
is your time. A drop of water runs down 
to the tip of the needle, halts and freezes. 
Then another, and another. Some get a little 
way, and give out. So the icicle grows bigger. 
Others manage to reach the point. So the icicle 
grows longer. It is about the only vegetable 
that grows downward, except Spanish moss. 
The engineer takes his dinner out of a little tin 
pail, and eats it before your eyes. The fireman 
keeps up the fire, and warms his feet before 
your toes. You ask the driver what is going 
to be done. He suspends the polishing of a 
chicken bone for a second, and says, "Waitin' 
for time!" Meanwhile the wind has been busy. 
It has chucked your hat into the bank, and 
filled it with snow, Scripture measure. 

You go to the rear of the train and look 
back. You cannot see whence you came, nor 
how you ever did come, nor where you will ever 
get away. A brakeman starts out with a flag, 
and plods along the track. He need n't. There 
is nothing in the world that can come, and no 
more danger of colliding with a train than there 
is with the Fourth of July. He has started for 



SNOW-BOUND. &> 

the last station, but he is in sight as long as you 
can see him, and you could see him longer only 
it is getting dark. By-and-by he returns, riding 
on an engine that catches us by the heels and 
drags us back to the station, where the hours 
put a great deal of lead in their shoes, and stalk 
slowly through the night. Two or three boys 
come in. They are all of a bigness, like young 
Esquimaux. They are Esquimaux. They stand 
between you and the stove, and stare at you. 
Like the moon, only one side of them is ever 
visible, and that is the fore side. They are glad 
there is a storm, glad the train is stopped. It 's 
fun. One of them has a basket of apples. You 
buy some. You might as well try to eat a stal- 
actite. They were frozen coming to the depot, 
or before they started, or as soon as they ripened, 
and you never knew when. Those boys laugh 
at your discomfiture, and you hope there are 
white bears in Labrador, and that one of them 
is in a drift outside with a good appetite, and 
that he will catch that apple-vender and empty 
the basket and eat the boy ! By-and-by the first 
engine gives a frosty whistle and the second 
engine gives another, and the conductor lets his 
head in at the door and shouts " All aboard ! " 
as if he had been hindered all this while wait- 
ing for you to buy apples and wish for bears ; 
and the passengers clamber into the car and 
huddle, up, and away they go. 



86 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

There is a lecturer on board, an itinerant 
vender of literary wares. He is as quiet as a 
statue, the coolest man in the party, and they 
are all half-frozen. At Pulaski, or Mexico, or 
some other foreign or ancient town upon that 
road, an audience awaits him. The Glee Club 
has sung itself out. The village boys have burned 
off their boot-toes on the red-hot stove. The 
blessed committee — if the town is large they 
number two, but if small, then five — have gone 
to the depot to catch the lecturer. He do n't 
come, so they try to strike him with lightning, but 
the wire is down and they miss him. The com- 
mittee return to the hall and dismiss the hungry 
ears. The ears level objurgations at the lecturer 
— that word "objurgation" always reminds me 
of a club with a knot in it — and lift their skirts, 
and tie down their pantaloons, and trail them- 
selves home. The train rolls in on muffled wheels 
at midnight, and the lecturer in it. But he 
does not land — not he — but keeps on to Oswe- 
go, where are more ears. During the day he 
hears from the committee. They want him to 
pay for lighting that hall, and making that fire, 
and printing those bills, and spoiling their course, 
and he pays it, and never more sees the halls 
of the Montezumas, if it be Mexico, or shrieks 
with Campbell's Freedom, "when Kosciusko fell," 
if it be Pulaski. 



SNOW-BOUND. 87 

When thus snow-wrecked, there are several 
ways of getting warm without fire, though fire is 
best. And just here comes in that queer law of 
association. If reading about Dr. Kane's watch, 
that he handled with fur gloves because it was 
so cold it burned him, will not do, try Mungo 
Park toasting to death under an African tree, 
or fancy yourself wiping your brow with a dicky 
in the presence of an admiring audience, or sit- 
ting down upon your new hat in a lady's parlor 
— if none of these things will start the circu- 
lation, then nothing will do but fire. That ex- 
perience of yours in Labrador occurred in early 
April, when bluebirds ought to be coming, and 
the sugar-bush bright with the camp-fire, and 
you think of a ride you took in another April 
long ago, upon the Memphis & Charleston Rail- 
way. You left Stevenson, a hamlet among the 
Cumberlands. The train was indigo - blue with 
soldiers. The country was wild with alarms. 
War may kill the husbandman, but it never halts 
the Spring. Life is bound to break in green 
surges along the woods and brighten the moun- 
tains. The air was warm as Northern June. 
The sky was soft as a maiden's eye — I do n't 
mean Minerva — the sun unshorn of a tress of 
strength. You passed Huntsville, Alabama. You 
were in a country lovely as a pleasant dream. 
The flowers all abroad in the garden, a touch 



88 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

of gold upon the growing grain, the doors and 
windows all set wide open. The swift train, 
like a shuttle in a loom, wove the threads of 
green and blue, and the strands of sunshine, 
and the fancy-work of flowers, into one exquisite 
piece of tapestry, and laid it along the summer 
land. Out of the chill of the mountains, you 
washed your hands in the blessed air, all tinted 
and perfumed, and were glad. You left Nash- 
ville, Louisville, Indianapolis, Chicago, behind you. 
You are bound for La Crosse. Twenty-four 
hours ago it was June. Now it is March. The 
ground is frosted like a bridal loaf. The pas- 
tures are brown. The woods lift their giant arms 
in silent waiting. 

The engine lias run over parallels of latitude 
as if they were shadows, but it has done more. 
It has borne you from summer to winter in a 
round day. The stain of ripe strawberries is on 
your fingers, but your fingers are in mittens ! 
We are all fashioned to live a great while in a 
little while, if we only know how. June and 
January are nearer together than any other brace 
of months in all the year. Show us the boy 
who, when he counts his temporal treasures and 
thinks of the Fourth of July, does not make a 
mental dive for his Christmas stocking the next 
minute ! 



SCALDED TO DEA TH, 89 



CHAPTER XII. 



SCALDED TO DEATH. 

Steam has ruined a great many things for us, 
and spoiled much poetry that was good and true 
in \ks time. The songs of the fireside to myriads 
are dead songs. What do they know about 
hearths and hickory, of backstick and forestick 
and topstick, and a great, cheerful fire, with a 
human smile and a human companionship in it, 
who camp around an unilluminated hole in the 
floor, and feel a gust of hot air like a simoon? 
Did you ever sit before a fireplace in a fall night 
— an eccentric philologist says that "autumn" 
is a better word than "fall"! — with somebody 
you owned to loving very much ; sat an hour 
without speaking, and looked into the fire, you 
and he, you and she, and yet it seemed to 
you as if you had been talking all the while ? 
It was the fire ! No couple can sit and think 
thus around that defective spot in the floor, and 
enjoy it, unless they are idiots. Then steam has 
ruined the Iambic poetry of the flails, and sub- 



90 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

stituted therefor a gigantic smut-machine, that 
runs wild in the field, and puts people's eyes 
out, and gives them the consumption, and burns 
up the wheat stack, and blows up the engineer. 
Where is your champion cradler, that went in 
with his skeleton fingers and laid out the grain 
becomingly, after a Christian fashion? Dead. 
Steam killed him. And what has become of the 
reaper, and Longfellow's, and everybody else's 
poetry about him ? Cut to pieces with knives, 
ground fine with wheels. 

The clean and blessed fists that kneaded the 
dough after a pugilistic fashion in the old days, 
and moulded it into an eloquent answer to one 
of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, have for- 
gotten their cunning — steamed to death. Enter 
a Mechanical Bakery. Steam has bewitched 
everything. Yonder are three, five, eight barrels 
of flour tumbling about in a mass of dough that 
would crush a district school, teacher and all. 
No hands. There are doors opening in the two- 
story oven, and cars laden with bread and crack- 
ers come rolling out on a railroad track, and the 
doors close behind them. No hands. Yonder 
runs a train in at an open door. It will stay 
in the hot chamber twenty minutes, and come 
out of its own accord. The engine has burned 
up the rolling-pin and the moulding-board, and 
the big wooden cradle wherein they kept the 



SCALDED TO DEA TH. 91 

dough warm till it " rose " like any other mem- 
ber of the family ; the fork wherewith the blessed 
biscuits and the mince-pies were tattooed like 
New Zealanders is thrown away, and the knife 
that marked the old oval shortcakes thus, **, and 
without which household monogram shortcakes 
were not shortcakes, has followed the fork. 

When they kindled a fire within the ribs of 
oak, and sent the steamer panting around the 
world, the old tradition of the ship was scalded 
to death. No more the tall masts cloud up, as 
the sky clouds, at the captain's word of com- 
mand. No more does the breath of his trumpet 
roll up the piles of sails, volume above volume, 
and the nimble blue-jackets perched aloft swing 
themselves along the ratlines, and cling to noth- 
ing, like so many garden-spiders in their webs. 
It is a mimic storm of canvas, with Jack-tars in- 
stead of angels playing "in the plighted clouds !" 
Take a full-rigged ship, showing everything she 
can carry, and dressed in her best bunting, and 
watch her with a glass as she comes up into the 
horizon and stands squarely upon the visible sea, 
courtesying her way into the harbor like a high- 
born dame of the olden time! It is the state- 
liest thing, so far, of man's making. 

Read of the naval battles that went long ago 
into song and story ; of the great admirals ; of 
Nelson and the rest ; of the masterly manoeu- 



92 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

\ ciing of McDonough and Perry and all the dead 
Commodores that have made lake and sea mem- 
orable, when they spread their great wings and 
swooped down upon the enemy like sea-eagles. 
It is grand to think of. No machinery below 
deck grinding away like a mill ; nothing aboard 
but the capstan, to heave in the cables and 
bring the anchors home. It must have been 
something worth while to float a broad pennant 
from a seventy-four, manned with a thousand 
men ! Steam and wheels have succeeded to the 
old glories, and when you see a low-quartered 
crocodile of a thing, black, unseemly, hugging 
the water, and with a dingy-looking drum upon 
its back, never despise it ! There is no telling 
what it can do. It is a turreted monitor in an 
iron jacket, and carries a gun so preposterously 
large, that it is not a boat with a gun in it, but 
a gun with a boat to it. It rips up your sev- 
enty-four as a rhinoceros an elephant, and sneaks 
about under the guns unscathed. 

Of guns : those Woolwich infants, as they call 
them with a sort of grim facetiousness, that will 
throw eight hundred pounds of iron seven miles! 
As far as you can trot a horse comfortably in 
an hour. Could n't they be used to move an 
iron-mine from one country to another ? These 
devices, that steam and wheels are at the bot- 
tom of, brought into the service of Mars and 



SCALDED TO DEA TH. 93 

his tomahawk of a sister, Bellona, never seemed 
to me so much the square and fair implements 
of manly warfare, as infernal machines that ought 
to be gathered up and packed away in the base- 
ment of John Milton's " Paradise Lost," with 
their makers just inside the door to keep watch 
lest somebody should steal them ! Then, again, 
wheels are doing their best to trundle an ex- 
quisite Scriptural picture out of fashion. Ships 
flock not so much "like doves to the windows," 
as tremendous forges afloat, with their pillared 
smokes on high ; the very cloud that came out 
of the little bottle and took shape, and was the 
greatest of the Genii in the Arabian Nights. 



94 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XIII. 



ALL ABOARD ! 

A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road 
bound for California — a long, full train — a small 
world on wheels. Everybody's double is aboard. 
The first twenty-four hours settles things. The 
little bursts of talk have given out. The great 
monotone of the wheels sounds over all. In the 
second twenty -four the small stock of gossip, 
brought along fresh, is consumed with the last 
crumbs of the home luncheon that was brought 
along with it. People begin to show their grain. 
One man is a bear. He falls back on the re- 
serves, and sucks his paws for a living, and win- 
ters through the trip. He is n't a playful bruin, 
but he is harmless. He entered the car tolerably 
plump. He leaves it intolerably lean. He is a 
•Spring bear. 

Another falls to devouring books — he eats as 
a horse eats, incessantly ; he talks as a horse 
talks, not at all — reads right through States, Ter- 
ritories and deserts, over rivers, mountains and 



ALL ABOARD. 95 

plains. He might as well have gone to the 
Pacific in a tunnel. 

See that woman in gray? A dormouse. She 
sleeps little naps fifty miles long, several times a 
day. She is an arrow of a woman — only aims 
at what she means to hit. A great many people 
are arrows : they get through the world with 
nothing to show for it. 

Her neighbor is a knitter. Click, click, go the 
needles all day long. She would be glad to "knit 
up Care's raveled sleeve," or the hose for a fire- 
company. Wholesome to look at with her white 
cap and silver hair, but no more of a traveling 
companion than a cat. 

Yonder is a motherly old lady, going to see a 
son in Iowa or Nebraska, and stay all winter. 
She lives in a house that has a lean-to and a 
great motherly kitchen, where they set the dough 
r'own on the hearth in its big wooden cradle, and 
make cider apple sauce by the barrel, and give 
you good, honest cheer. You can tell all this by 
her looks. 

There 's an old-time Eastern grandma. If any- 
body had told her twenty years ago she would 
ever wander beyond the Missouri River, she 
would have thought anybody an idiot. The loco- 
motive has done it, and is whisking her across 
the continent ! She takes snuff. There is a faint 
suspicion of " Scotch " on her upper lip. She 



96 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

lakes out the shiny black box from her black 
silk workbag — the shiny black box with a yel- 
low picture of Queen Anne, or somebody in a 
mighty ruff, upon the cover. She holds that box 
in her left hand. She takes off the cover and 
whips it under the box with her right. She 
gives the side two little knocks with a knuckle. 
The tawny titillative sets itself aright in the box. 
There is something in the snuff looking like a 
discomfited beetle, that shakes the yellow dust off 
at her double knock. It is a vanilla bean. It 
is a liberal box — liberal as her dear old heart — 
and holds seventy-five sneezes ! She offers it to 
everybody within arm's-length. A true gentleman 
who abominates snuff takes a dainty pinch with 
a smile and a " thank you." So does a genuine 
lady. But a saucy chit, of modern make, snuffs 
contemptuously without taking any, and so does 
a dashing sprig of a fellow who never had a 
grandmother, and deserves none. This Old- World 
courtesy over, grandma takes a pinch herself. 
Watch her. She touches first this side, then that, 
in a delicate way, with a thumb and finger, 
shuts her eyes, and with two long comforting 
snuffs disposes of the allowance. Mrs. James 
Madison was a lady. So is grandma. Mrs. James 
Madison took snuff and displayed two handker- 
chiefs, one for preliminaries, and the other, as 
she herself said, "for polishing off." So does 



ALL ABOARD. 97 

grandma. One is cotton and blue, and the other 
is cambric and white. She sneezes. God bless 
her ! Her life has been as harmless as a bed of 
sage, and as wholesome as summer-savory. 

Is it a sin to take snuff? Not for grandma. 
There is no Bible prohibition for anybody, and 
not because Sir Walter Raleigh lived a while 
after Bible times, either. Neither were there 
railroads then, but here is an injunction to rail- 
way travelers, in case of accidents, as old as 
Hebrew: "Their strength is in sitting still/" 
The writer saw a man leave a car because it 
had broken loose from a train, jump head-first 
against a wood-pile, and knock his brains out. 
To make a cautious statement, he thinks those 
brains were a severe loss to the owner. The 
writer has seen a man weighing fourteen stone 
try to climb into the hat-rack to get out of 
harm's way, when the train left the track. Had 
the car turned over, there would have been an- 
other heavy cerebral calamity. 

Yonder is a party of four around a little table. 
You catch fragments of talk about "decks" and 
" right-bowers," as if they were sailors ashore ; 
"clubs," as if they were policemen; "kings" 
and " queens," like so many royalists ; " going 
to Chicago," when they are all bound West; 
" tricks," as if they were conjurors. Then a 
laugh, somebody says " euchre ! " and the game 

13 



98 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

and the secret are out together. An old man 
in a home-spun coat and a puzzled face watches 
the quartette. It is all Greek to him. He used 
to play " old sledge" when he was a boy, on 
the hay-mow of a rainy afternoon and nothing 
to do. The quaint face cards look familiar, but 
their conduct is inexplicable. 

A man needs about as many resources on a 
long railway journey as Robinson Crusoe needed 
on that island of his. He wants a " man Fri- 
day " of some sort. If, like Mark Twain's Holy 
Land mud-turtles, he cannot sing himself, he 
must know how to make others sing. Have you 
never met a man who was a sort of diachylon 
plaster ? Who drew you out in spite of your- 
self, and put you at your best, till you were 
not quite sure what lie had been doing to yoU? 
That man knows how to travel. Two prime 
qualities go to the make - up of a successful 
tourist : the art of seeing and the art of listen- 
ing. If, added to these, he understands the art 
of telling, then he is a triumph in a locomotive 
way. 

But the wheels are beating the iron bars like 
a hundred hammers. It is a November night, 
and the icy rain drives sharply against the Avin- 
dows. The out-look is dreary enough. The 
Argumentative Man — there is almost always one 
on board — has gone to sleep. You know him. 



ALL ABOARD. 99 

He 's the man who sits upon the seat in front of 
you, and overhears you make some statement to 
a friend — perhaps doctrinal. Your Argumentative 
Man is strong on doctrine. He wheels about on 
the seat, throws one leg over the arm, and picks 
you up. He addresses you as " Neighbor," or 
"Stranger," — possibly "Colonel." If the last, 
you know whence he comes, and wish he would 
make himself the second, and are glad he is not 
the first. But he begins upon you. He quotes 
Paul at you, or Isaiah, or Genesis, or somebody. 
He crows over you. He gets upon his hind feet, 
and stands in the aisle and raises his voice, and 
looks around upon the half-dozen within ear-shot 
to challenge their admiration when he thinks he 
makes a point. He is the man that always lays 
his argument upon the thumb-nail of his left 
hand, leveled like an anvil, and then forges it 
every second or two with the thumb-nail of his 
right hand, and when he thinks he has you fast 
just holds one nail on the other a little while, 
as if it were you he had finished and was hold- 
ing there till you got. cool. 

That man is exasperating. It is next to im- 
possible to be a Christian where he is, and very 
hard to be a decent man. They give penny-royal 
tea to bring out the measles. He is a decoction 
of "human penny-royal, and brings to the surface 
all the ill humors there are in you. Sometimes 



100 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

your Argumentative Man is a clergyman, some- 
times a layman, but you wish the train was a 
ship bound for Tarshish, and the Man's name was 
Jonah, and a convenient whale alongside, though 
you are sorry for the whale — but then we are all 
selfish, if we are not whales ! But the Man 
is asleep, and the knitting-work put away, and 
the cards have had their last shuffle, and grand- 
ma is dreaming of home, and ever so many more 
are gazing up at the car lights in a stupid way, 
or looking out through the blank windows at — 
nothing. The man with the black bottle is low- 
spirited, so is the bottle, and he has settled his 
head down between his shoulders — shut up like 
a telescope. It is all dull and stupid enough. 

There are two women seated together, plain 
women, say forty-five or fifty years old. They 
have good, open, friendly faces. Plainly dressed, 
modest, and silent save when they conversed 
with each other, you had hardly noticed them. 
Perhaps there was the least touch of rural life 
about them. They would make capital country 
aunts to visit in mid-summer, or mid-winter for 
that matter. If they were mothers at all, they 
were good ones. So much you see, if you know 
how. 

Well, it was wearing on towards twelve o'clock 
— the reader is requested to believe that this is 
no fancy sketch — when through the dull silence 



ALL ABOARD. 101 

there rose a voice as clear and mellow and flex- 
ible as a girl's, of the quality that goes to the 
heart like the greeting of a true friend. It be- 
longed to one of those women. She sat with her 
white face, a little seamed with time and trouble, 
turned neither to the right nor the left, seem- 
ingly unconscious that she had a listener. They 
were the old songs she sang — the most of them, 
— songs of the conference and the camp — such 
as the sweet young Methodists, and Baptists 
withal, with their hair combed back, used to sing 
in the years that are gone. 
First it was 

" Rock of Ages ! cleft for me," 

and then, 

" Our days are gliding swiftly on." 

The clear tones grew rounder and sweeter. Those 
that were awake listened ; those that were asleep 
awoke all around her. Some left their seats and 
came nearer, but she never noticed them. A 
brakeman, who had not heard a " psalm tune " 
since his mother led him to church by the hand 
when he was a little boy, and who was rattling 
the stove as if he were fighting a chained ma- 
niac, laid down the poker and stood still. 
Then it was : 

" A charge to keep I have," 

and so hymn after hymn, until at last she struct 
up: 



102 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

" I will sing you a song of that Beautiful Land, 
The far-away home of the soul, 
Where no storms ever beat on the glittering strand, 
While the years of eternity roll. 

" O, that home of the soul in my visions and dreams 
Its bright jasper walls I can see, 
And T fancy but dimly the veil intervenes 
Between that fair city and me." 

The car Avas a wakeful hush long before she 
had ended ; it was as if a beautiful spirit were 
floating through the air. None that heard will 
ever forget. Philip Phillips can never bring that 
" home of the soul " any nearer to anybody. And 
never, I think, was quite so sweet a voice lifted 
in the storm of a November night on the roll- 
ing plains of IoAva. It is a year ago. The sing- 
er's name, home and destination no one learned, 
but the thought of one listener follows her with 
an affectionate interest. Is she living ? Surely 
singing, wherever she is. I bid her Godspeed, 
She charmed and cheered the November gloom 
with carols of the Celestial City. She passed 
with the full dawn of the coming morning out 
of our lives, and there is a strange ache at the 
heart as we think so. Whoever heard her that 
night could write her epitaph. They could say 
— they could write : 

SACRED 
TO THE MEMORY 

OF THE 

WOMAN WITH THE SONGS 

IX THE NIGHT. 



EARL V AND LA TE. 103 



CHAPTER XIV. 



EARLY AND LATE. 



Swift motion is the passion of the age. See 
a picture, see a statue, see a poem, the question 
is, How long did it take to do it ? The press 
that does an old-fashioned month's work in thirty 
minutes ; the method by which the engraver's pa- 
tient labor, with skill in every touch of the burin, 
for a weary week, is counterfeited in fifteen min- 
utes ; the sewing-machine that kills one woman 
and does the work of twenty more, running up 
a seam like a squirrel up a limb ; the railroad 
train that can stitch two distant places the most 
closely together — such are the things that kindle 
enthusiasm. 

Did you ever see a man who had not ridden 
a mile a minute, or who did not think he had ? 
("A mile a minute" is a bit of flippant talk, 
like the man's who declared of a certain Fourth 
of July that he had seen a hundred better cele- 
brations.) I never did, except two. One of them 
had never seen a locomotive, and the other con- 



104 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

scientiously thought he went a lit-tle short of 
fifty -nine. A mile a minute has considerable 
meaning. It implies a velocity of eighty-eight 
feet in a second. It would keep a train ahead, 
or at least abreast, of a brisk gale, so that there 
would be no wind at all. It wouldn't disturb 
your front hair, my girl, if you stood on the rear 
platform, and played Lot's wife by looking over 
your shoulder. It couldn't catch you — at least 
it couldn't fan you — for it is a spanking gale 
that makes sixty miles an hour in harness. 

But everybody has gone a mile a minute by 
the cars. The writer has tried to tell a number 
of people several times that he had ; that be- 
tween New - Buffalo and Michigan City, on the 
Michigan Central Road, and one of the noblest 
and best - officered thoroughfares in the land, he 
did go five miles in a minute apiece ; and he 
went on explaining that the track was straight 
as an arrow and smooth as glass, so that his 
auditors might believe it and wonder over it, and 
they all, one after another, rose and declared that 
they had gone a mile a minute, and not one of 
them as few miles as a paltry five ! Were you 
ever standing on the deck of a sailing-craft, with 
a brisk breeze blowing, when all at once it fell 
to a dead calm, or went about so that your face 
was swashed with the wet canvas, and your hat 
knocked overboard? The writer was that unfor- 



EARL Y AND LA TE. 105 

tunate navigator. So now he contents himself 
with telling that, years ago, he rode on a train 
of the old Toledo & Adrian Railway — strap- 
rail at that, where they had just half spikes 
enough, and pulled them out after the train 
passed, and drove them into the other end of 
the bars, to be ready for the engine when it 
returned — rode twelve miles an hour — a mile 
every five minutes ; that it was good time, and 
everybody was proud of it. All of which was 
true. His auditors are all silent. He has the 
track ; for if one of them ever rode any more 
slowly, he is ashamed to let anybody know it! 
But there has not been the wonderful increase 
of speed on railways that we are led to think. 
Thus, thirteen years ago last May — 1860 — at the 
time of the Chicago Convention, the train bearing 
the Eastern delegates ran from Toledo to Chicago, 
over the Michigan Southern Road, two hundred 
and forty-three miles, in five hours and fifty 
minutes,-- -forty and a half miles an hour. It 
ran a match race with a train on the Michigan 
Central, and reached Chicago twenty-five minutes 
ahead. It was a great day for the late John D. 
Campbell, the Superintendent of the winning 
road, when, standing on the steps of the Sher- 
man House in Chicago, he introduced the Super- 
intendent and passengers of the belated Central 
to the crowd brought by the Southern, that were 

14 



106 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

there awaiting them. Poor Campbell ! he has 
gone to the silent terminus of all earthly lines. 
Not long ago, Mr. Vanderbilt and party made a 
trip from St. Louis to Toledo, the engines doing 
their best. The distance is four hundred and 
thirty-two miles, the rate forty and one-tenth 
miles an hour, the actual running forty-five and 
a half — an average not decidedly favorable to 
continued health or remarkable length of days. 
Locomotives never cultivate the grace of pa- 
tience, though we should naturally think they 
would. The more engines there are to puff for 
us, the more we puff. We chafe at a detention 
of thirty minutes more than our grandfathers did, 
of thirty days. You know the man that always 
wants to go faster? Of the twin luxuries of 
high civilization, grumbling and the gallows, he 
enjoys grumbling best. His watch in one hand, 
his Guide in the other, and neither right, he 
compares the whereabouts of the one with the 
time of the other. He vows we are not going 
fifteen miles an hour when the rate is twenty- 
five if it is a rod. His chronic mania is to 
"connect" He didn't "connect" yesterday, nor 
the day before, nor any other day, and he never 
will " connect " again as long as he lives. He 
is n't willing the engine should have a billet of 
wood or a drop of water. In fact, he is op- 
posed to the train stopping at all, to let any- 



EARLY AND LATE. 107 

body off or on, until he has ridden out the last 
inch of his ticket. Denouncing collisions, he 
hopes that train Number One — his train is al- 
ways Number One — will not wait a minute for 
Number Two, that is plunging on towards him 
upon a single track like a DevilVdarning-needle. 
"Haven't we got the right of way?" and that 
settles it. 

The fellow has lost the escapement out of his 
mental watch-works, and he runs down as quick 
as you wind him up. Take him to pieces, and 
you will find he has none. Years ago, one of 
the staunch old Lake steamers made the quickest 
trip from Buffalo to Chicago then on the record 
of locomotion. Its passengers took a last look of 
New York and a first look of Chicago a little 
nearer together than anybody ever did before. 
The writer happened to be on the dock at Chica- 
go when the steamer was nearing it. " Forward," 
was a man with a carpet-bag in his hand. He 
was a rusty man, as if he had been lost like 
a pocket-knife, and somebody had accidentally 
dug him up. He was trying to get over the 
guards somewhere, so as to jump ashore before 
the steamer " made a landing." He acted like 
an unruly stee_ trying bo find a low place in 
the fence. Now, as it proved, he was the same 
man you always see in he cars, who wants to 
go faster. He had come from a Schoharie County 



108 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Hollow, where the sun never rises till eight 
o'clock and goes to bed two hours before night. 
He had driven a yoke of ruminants and hoof- 
dividers since childhood. He was going out West 
to see an uncle who did not know that he was 
coming, and would not have cared a straw if he 
had known. He had made the quickest voyage 
on record, but he was the original man who 
wants to go faster. 

From the sacred to the profane is, as the 
world reads, like turning over a leaf in a book. 
Admiral Blake, a rough but noble old sea-dog, 
who used to take his steamer safely through as 
dirty weather as ever slopped a deck, saw this 
man, and, albeit not the president of any insti- 
tution of learning, conferred the degree upon 
him then and there of D.D., the two letters 
being kept at a proper distance by a dash, and 
he gave him a name that could hardly have been 
his father's. It was the short word that Mr. 
Froude threw at the New York reporter's head 
when he asked the historian how he pronounced 
his name : " Like double o in fool, sir." The 
old Admiral's profanity is thus left scattered 
through this sentence in a fragmentary condition. 
It is hardly worth while to pick it up and ad- 
just it. 

Only this : I never could see the piety of 



EARL Y AND LA TE. 109 

printing an oath with a dash in it. The wolf's 
scalp is all you need to have to get the bounty. 
To impale an oath upon a straight stick neither 
hurts the oath nor helps the swearer. It is pro- 
fanity by brevet, and ought to be banished from 
the realm of type. If a man wants to write 
" infernal," and he should not want to write it 
unless it is proper, let him letter it squarely 
out i-n-f-e-r-n-a-1, instead of sneaking into print 
with the head and tail of it- — in-f-n-1. 

There used to be a picture that presented the 
funny side of the man who is always a little late. 
It showed a railway train rolling grandly out, 
the fleeces of smoke dotting the route on the air 
above it. Behind, at the distance of an eighth of 
a mile, and losing ground every minute, as you 
knew by his looks, was a man, his long hair 
and his short coat-skirt leveled away behind him 
like the two horizontals of the letter F. He 
was after the train; he had been left, and those 
railroad ties flew out from under his feet at a 
lively rate. The engine enjoyed it, and the artist 
helped to give expression to the creature's sat- 
isfaction, for on every volume of smoke and 
steam, in letters constantly growing smaller and 
feebler as the clouds rolled farther and farther 
away, like a faint cry in the distance, he had 
written the words 

" I 'VE GOT YOUR TRUNK ! " 

" I Ve got your trunk ! " 

"I've got your trunk!" 

"I've got your trunk!" 



110 



THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



You could hear that jolly and saucy locomotive 
say every word of it. 

The man who lets himself loose to pursue a 
train is a public benefactor. Everybody is pleased 
with the performance— but the performer. The 



j^uf^m 




A LITTLE LATE! 



loungers on the platform at the station encourage 
him with shouts that put " spurs in the sides of 
his intent." The engineer leans out at his win- 
dow and lets the engine whistle for 'him, and 
sometimes slackens a little, just by way of de- 
lusive encouragement. The brakeman on the rear 
platform seems to be putting on the brakes with 



EARLY AND LATE. Ill 

might and main, to hold the train for him to 
catch it. Passengers beckon to him, and wave 
him on with hand and handkerchief. When he 
lags a little, the observers cheer him, and he 
dashes on in prodigious bursts of speed. Boys 
whirl up their hats and bet he '11 win. But 
his heart begins to kick like an unruly colt, and 
he comes to a halt and stands like a mile-post 
and stares after the receding train. Then he 
turns and, mopping his face with his handkerchief, 
walks slowly over the course. He does not seem 
anxious to reach the depot, although by the 
laughing of the crowd he knows they are all 
glad to see him coming. He can count more 
teeth than he ever saw at one time, except in a 
Saginaw gang-saw mill. But he seems to shrink 
in a modest way from the greeting he is so 
sure of. 

Now there were Christians in that crowd. 
There must have been. There were in Sodom. 
There are everywhere except among the Modocs. 
But I am afraid there was not a Christian on 
that train or about that station that in his se- 
cret heart wanted that man to catch the cars 
— that could have prayed for the achievement, 
no matter what depended upon it, and kept his 
countenance. 



112 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XV. 



DEAD HEADS. 



" D. H.' 9 Everybody knows what D. H. is* 
He sees it on the telegram that costs him noth- 
ing. He sees it in the glass when he looks at 
himself, if he rides free upon the train — Dead 
Head. It never had a pleasant sound, and lately 
it has grown almost opprobrious. In the begin- 
ning, the courtesy of a pass was extended to 
the drivers of the quill. The editor and his 
family and his wife's mother and the pressman 
and the devil all rode scot-free. 

Then State Lycurguses en masse with their 
families and their mothers-in-law, members of 
every house of Congress, all kinds of Judges, 
all people that were " their Excellencies," or 
" Honorables," very rich men that could buy a 
couple of hundred miles of the road and not 
mind it, and last, clergymen. These were classed 
with children under eight years old, for they 
went at half-fare — rode one half mile for noth- 
ing and paid for the other half. The ground of 



DEAD HEADS. 113 

this fractional manifestation of grace is debatable. 
Possibly it was poverty, and if poverty, then to 
the shame of the churches that received the 
earnest and incessant labors of men, and then 
sent them out begging for a living. It is a hard, 
ugly word, but it is the true one. 

At length when, upon a single line of road, 
six thousand people were all riding at once fare- 
free as a flock of pigeons ; and when people who 
held " complimentaries " were asked to hold their 
tongues when they ought to tell the truth, and 
shut their eyes when they ought to keep them 
open ; and when editors began to discover that 
their passes made them about the cheapest com- 
modities in the market, and that, by reason of 
the bit of pasteboard, they were doing more work 
for less money than anybody else in America, 
then there began to be a lull in the pass-system. 
Railroad Companies had spasms of resolutions 
that they would confer the degree of D. H. upon 
nobody. That was incredible, for when a rail- 
road finds it for its interest to issue a pass, you 
may believe the pass will be forthcoming with- 
out a pang. But the clergymen's half-loaf always 
seemed to me a sort of half-handed charity that 
should have been resented, in a Christian way, 
instead of being accepted. That, to-day, they 
generally recognize the fact that the people who 
do not pay them should furnish their tickets, 

15* 



114 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

instead of the people who never heard of them 
till they produced their credentials in order to 
be numbered with the infants, is a more truth- 
ful and manful view of the situation. 

There are D. H.'s beyond the meaning of the 
railways. There was a church in Otsego County, 
N. Y., with as many brains and as much grace 
in it as in any country church of its time. It 
had a minister, faithful, able, earnest, who preached 
out-and-out and through-and-through Bible ser- 
mons. He was not a "star-preacher." He knew 
little about astronomy save the Star of Bethle- 
hem. That man preached forty years for that 
church, and they never paid him a dollar. They 
made " bees," and drew up his winter's wood, 
and cut his grain. That was all. 

Well, he was gathered to his fathers, but he 
had spoiled the church. He had educated it to 
be D. H. without knowing it. After he died, 
the deacons went looking about for a two- 
hundred-and-fifty-dollar minister, and you can get 
about as much minister for that price as you can 
get psalm-tune out of a file. Finally they tried 
five hundred dollars' worth. It was a cheap 
article they got. It was hard to hear him preach, 
but harder for them to pay him for it. They 
had been deplorably educated. They were Dead- 
Heads. 

Their church edifice stands to-day on a hill, 



DEAD HEADS. 115 

like the Celestial City, but it is a very dilapi- 
dated one. If you go there any summer Sun- 
day, you shall find it untenanted save by the 
fowls of the air. They had a funeral there last 
season, for Death opens the old building some- 
times, and on a window-ledge near where the 
gray-haired singers used to strike up " Mear " 
and " Corinth " and old " China," a mother-bird 
— a robin — sat undisturbed upon her nest. The 
good old Elder's grave across the road is sunken 
and weed-grown. " So runs the world away." 

Writing of churches : By a sort of common 
consent, Modocs seem to be excepted from any 
general plan of salvation but the Quaker plan. 
The writer once went as far West as the rail- 
road could carry him, and then took the bare 
ground into Nebraska till he struck the Indian 
country, and found a Mission twenty years old 
in the wilderness. It is probable that very few 
of them deserved baptizing, but they all wanted 
washing. Having heard the little Indians sing 
hymns, you went about a mile and saw where 
they had buried a horse, that the dead brave 
might make a good appearance on the Happy 
Hunting Grounds, which they thought he would 
reach in about fourteen days. 

You saw red-ochre fellows who were well up 
in the three IVs — "reading, 'riting and 'rithme- 
tic" — who had slipped back into the old burrows 



116 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

as naturally as woodchucks. You saw one young 
man, tolerably educated, who had served in the 
Federal army, and served well, sunning himself 
on the turfed slope of a summer wigwam. All 
that was left of his civilization was the tatters 
of a pair of blue pantaloons. He had slipped 
back into his blanket, and felt as much at home 
in it as a fawn in his spots, though the com- 
parison is greatly damaging to the fawn. You 
ask him about this advance backwards, and he 
says, " 'Mong white folks nothin' but Ingen. 
'Mong Ingen nobody — come back tribe be good 
Ingen as any." And you have the situation 
clearly stated for your consideration. 

You ask the missionary how many of the tribe 
he counts as Christian. He enumerates, and you 
wish to see one. He points him out, a villain- 
ous-looking old fellow with a lowering eye, and 
the most of his head packed like a knapsack 
behind his ears, and you think a little prelim- 
inary hewing and scoring would hardly come 
amiss to make him a safe man to meet in the 
night-time, and trim him down to Christian pro- 
portions. Say, with a hatchet, hew to a line com- 
mencing just in front of his organ of self-esteem, 
and make a clean sweep of things to a point 
just back of his ears. There would then be a 
better organization to begin upon. After that, 
Robert Raike's recipe, plenty of water with soap 



DEAD HEADS. 117 

in it, would be in order. Then try catechisms. 
Catch an Indian young, and something may be 
made of him if he does n't get away, but an old 
Indian is a tough creature to tame. You felt 
like asking the missionary if, this man being a 
Christian, there were many sinners near by. If 
so, it seemed prudent to get back to the rail- 
road without standing very particularly upon " the 
order of your going." 



118 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XVI. 



WORKING U BY THE DAY. 

Something is written elsewhere of the grave- 
yard luncheons they took in the Sunday noonings. 
Those were the times when the minister worked 
by the day. The Sunday school in the morning, 
for the lambs led off the flock. Then a hymn on 
both sides of the threshold of prayer, and a lit- 
tle carpet of Scripture laid down before it. The 
preacher would read the hymn, and say, " Sing 
five verses ;" and if he did not happen to put up 
the bars in this way across the narrow lane of 
praise, the choir were bound to sing it through, 
if it was as long as " The Ancient Mariner." 
Then the sermon, wherein there was a world of 
scoring and hewing, and showers of chips that 
hit people here and there, and the work was laid 
out generally. Then another hymn, the prayer 
and the benediction. This took till high noon. 
Then afternoon, wherein the morning's frame was 
put together, mortise and tenon each adjusted in 



WORKING "BY THE DAY." 119 

its own place, raised, roofed and sided, and a 
doctrine or so put into it to keep house. 

The afternoon was the forenoon over again, ex- 
cept that the grandest of all mere human breaths 
of praise, the Doxology, was sung, and " the 
disciples went out." The congregation always 
stood when the clergyman called upon the name 
of the Lord ; and sometimes he called a long 
time, and occasionally a feeble body, and now and 
then a lazy one, went down like a forest before 
a mighty wind ! Is there any becoming posture 
in public prayer between kneeling and standing ? 
Is it not either the one extreme or the other ? 
To see a congregation with their heads every 
way, like a field of barley after a hail-storm, 
does not inspire a sentiment of reverence ; but 
a people rising to their feet as one man is an 
impressive act of homage. Then the Bible class 
was chinked in somewhere between songs and 
sermons, and the conference-meeting came in the 
evening, and held till nine o'clock. For a day 
of rest, the old-fashioned Sunday was about as 
busy as a meadow full of hands with the hay 
down and a storm coming ! 

Once in four weeks was covenant-meeting. It 
occurred on Saturday afternoons, began at one, 
and lasted till four or five. The little boys of 
good people in the writer's childhood had to go 
to covenant-meeting. The writer's parents were 



120 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

good people, and he went. The reader is re- 
quested to remember that Saturday afternoon 
was the old-time holiday — the only day in the 
week when the small animal, man, could kick up 
its heels with the halter off. There is no recol- 
lection more vivid and more painful than of 
those tremendous Saturday afternoons. I had 
heard of Joshua, and I could n't persuade myself 
that he was dead, though I wickedly hoped he 
was, for somebody must have commanded the 
sun " to stand still," and it obeyed. 

The laugh of the children of the perverse gen- 
eration came faintly and sweetly from the neigh- 
boring orchard. The rays of the sun streamed 
aslant through the still air of the church like 
the visible ladder of glory, but not to the rest- 
less eyes that watched, but only the token of the 
expended day, and no other to be had till the 
last of next week. It was the later covenant 
the church members were renewing, but the old 
covenant made by the Lord with Noah would 
have been far preferable. There was something 
beautiful to look at about that — the seal of the 
covenant — the Bow of Seven. As it seems, now, 
there was a blunder somewhere. 

There was nothing upon wheels in that church. 
The shepherd stayed by his flock till his hair 
silvered, and his deacons were as gray as he. 
No clergyman was on wheels but the Methodist. 



WORKING "BY THE DAY." 121 

Had the gauge been right, and had there been 
railroads, it would have been convenient to have 
casters attached to the boots of the clergymen 
of that faith and order, for so they could be 
trundled away at will like pieces of heavy fur- 
niture ! 

There was a time when people put on their 
slippers, took a night-lamp, bade each other good 
night, and went up stairs to bed. Those people 
now go to bed by railway. They think nothing 
of fifty miles between counting-room and bed- 
room. They die out of the city every evening, 
and are born into it with newness of life every 
morning. It is a good thing. They live more, 
and they live longer, if the engine behaves itself; 
but when it gets a notion to pass a sister engine 
on a single track, or to try the bare ground, like 
a horse with his shoes off, that kicks up its heels 
in the pasture, or to climb aboard the train and 
be a passenger itself, perhaps the bedroom may 
be a few miles too far away, and the old geogra- 
phy be best. 

There was a time when we kept our dead 
about us ; in sight of the church windows where 
folks went in the Sunday noons to eat their lun- 
cheon, and leaned against gray slabs and read the 
dim-lettered records of the hamlet's forefathers, 
and talked about the sermon and the — crops. 
They had observed that things kept growing on 



122 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Sundays, and they mentioned it ! If not in sight 
of the church windows, then just in the edge of 
the village, a pleasant stroll after tea, where old 
people walked and looked grave, and young peo- 
ple sat and talked low, not so much about the 
mute Miltons or the village Hampdens, as an arti- 
cle, or so they fancied, situated somewhere under 
the left half of their jackets and bodices. Now, 
from " sanitary" considerations — I think that is 
the word — they have located the cemetery so far 
away that you must buy a ticket to reach it. 
"When first they began to hurry the dead to the 
grave at the rate of thirty miles an hour, it did 
give the old-time sense of the proprieties a little 
wrench, but it was not an outright fracture of 
anything, and so the proprieties were long ago 
convalescent. 



A SLANDERER AND A WEA THER MAKER. 123 



CHAPTER XVII. 



A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER. 

The Railroad is a slanderer. It maligns cities. 
With few exceptions it sneaks into town ; enters 
it by the cheapest end, as politicians say of can- 
didates, the most " available " way. By-the-by, is 
the " available " aspirant for office always the 
cheapest ? It comes in by people's backdoors ; 
it sees mops swinging like " banners on the outer 
wall;" it overlooks hen-houses; it flanks pig- 
pens ; it manufactures dead ducks and gone 
geese ; it commands barnyards. Take La Porte, 
on the Lake Shore Railroad — one of the most 
beautiful little cities in the whole West, nothing 
excepted. Its streets are pictures. Its shade is 
luxuriant. Its lakes are lovely as any classic 
water that ever inspired a poet's song. Ask the 
world that flits by on the Lake Shore, and never 
halts at all, about La Porte, and it says, a strag- 
gling Hoosier village, out at the elbows and the 
heels withal, fringed with shanties, mopsticks 
and swill-pails. And on he plunges in his ig- 



124 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

norance, knowing as little of the Gem of the 
Prairie as if he had been born, like a Mam- 
moth Cave fish, without any eyes at all. The 
Michigan Central and the Illinois Central Roads, 
in their approach to Chicago, are splendid excep- 
tions. Running on the water side and out at sea, 
if you please, they pass along the city front, 
with its stately structures, its spires and towers, 
as if it were a magnificent painting. By night, 
when garlanded with lights, it is as gorgeous as 
some Eastern queen arrayed in all her jewels. 

There are in America at least six hundred and 
forty railroads, without counting the branches. 
Of the latter there are hundreds, and it is curi- 
ous to observe how certain trunk roads resemble 
trees in putting out their branches and getting 
their growth. Thus the iron arms of the Michi- 
gan Central spread like a larch, the Chicago & 
Northwestern like a fern, while the Hudson 
River takes a straight shoot as limbless as a 
liberty-pole. We are apt to crowd the rhetoric 
sometimes, and say that railroads have taken 
America, and the continent is as full of fibres of 
iron as an oak leaf is of fibres of wood. I saw 
a letter the other day written by a Bishop of 
the Episcopal Church from his home here in 
America. That letter traveled a thousand miles 
before it struck a railroad ! His diocese is in 
the Hudson's Bay Company's country, and is no 



A SLANDERER AND A WEATHER MAKER. 125 

dooryard diocese either, for it is larger than 
many empires. 

But the locomotive ventures into improbable 
places for all that. Think of a ponderous en- 
gine, fashioned to grind miles under its wheels 
like a grist in a mill, being drawn, as one was 
a short time ago, under the Arch of Constantine 
at Rome, along the very road whereon the robe 
of Cicero trailed, if he did n't lift it, and the 
weak-eyed poet strolled ! Classic ground or Holy 
ground, it stands a poor chance with the loco- 
motive, for with the steam comes the newsboy, 
the boot-black, modern slang, irreverence, and — 
peanuts. 

No piece of mechanism has affected so widely, 
diversely and powerfully, the globe and its in- 
habitants, as the locomotive. That a railroad 
should influence the weather is the very last 
thing that would be suspected, but it must plead 
guilty to the charge, for in certain regions it is 
almost climatarchic — a presider over climate. 
That being the only hard word used, the offence 
should be easily forgiven. Let some recording 
angel, like Uncle Toby's, be found to drop a 
tear upon it, if need be, and blot it out. 

Everybody knows how the rains have descended 
and the floods come in regions of the continent 
and in seasons where and when little ever fell 
but dew. Number the facts from Utah to Cali- 



126 THE WOKLD ON WHEELS. 

fornia that are being washed down into human 
understandings by heavy showers. There is no 
danger of our being claimed by Sydney Smith's 
genuine Mrs. Partington, if we say that some- 
how — and we are not bound to tell how — the 
railroad brings rain. Would it not be wonderful 
if that brace of iron bars across the continent 
should literally interpret the pleasant Scripture, 
" And the desert shall blossom as the rose " ? 
And it looks like it. The old devices for arti- 
ficial irrigation are growing useless, and territory 
hitherto unproductive, is beginning to do some- 
thing for man. And this, not because of the 
pioneers to whom the railroad has made the 
desert possible and accessible, but because of its 
direct influence upon the climate. Rain- clouds 
west of the Rockies, that have never spoken a 
loud word within the memory of man, are now 
talking as audibly and emphatically as if thunder 
had been their mother-tongue from babyhood, and 
rank vegetation is springing where nothing was 
ever before sown but fire. 

The vast system of iron net-work and the 
hair-lines of telegraphy, about enough to make a 
snare to catch the planet, have disturbed the 
electrical equilibrium, and the results are seen 
in the new and novel phenomena of thunder and 
shower. By the way, did you ever know any 
part of a train to be struck by lightning? There 



A SLANDERER AND A WE A THER MAKER. 127 

are three or four accounts on record of such an 
occurrence, but the testimony is doubtful and 
obscure. Running in what are generally deemed 
the most dangerous places, along the tall fences 
of telegraph-poles, so often shattered by lightning, 
and throwing up such volumes of heat, smoke 
and steam, all of which are supposed to be 
favorite thoroughfares of the mysterious agent, it 
seems strange that, if our scientific facts are facts 
at all, many accidents by lightning do not occur 
upon the railway. But the direction of the bolt 
is determined before it leaves the cloud, and a 
train is nothing but a slender thread trailed along 
the earth's surface. What the locomotive will 
yet do for all kinds of man — mechanic, agricul- 
tural, scientific, moral — is an unsolved problem! 
A glance at the initial chapter of its history 
assures us that it will be as marvelous in the 
future as it was unlooked for in the past. 



128 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 



DREAMING ON THE CARS. 

When a man travels, what material baggage 
he takes is immaterial, but he leaves behind him 
a great deal of mental and moral impedimenta. 
There used to be a saying among the traders to 
Santa Fe, " If there is any dog in a man he 
will show it out on the trail." During the war, 
people going to the front were astonished to learn 
what manner of people some of their nearest 
neighbors really were. It is so in the world on 
wheels. Men and women show out wonderfully. 
But whatever you put on to go a-journeying, 
even to that new silk hat, if you must, never 
put on airs. They are altogether too gauzy to 
be warm in winter, or decent in summer. Many 
a woman has told you, without intending it, 
that the entertainment she regarded with such 
measureless contempt is better than anything she 
ever encountered at home. Clothes have become 
transparent as window-glass. They utterly fail 
as a disguise. 



DREAMING ON THE CARS. 129 

You grow conscious on a railway train, as no- 
where else, what trifles go to make up the warp 
and woof of life. Thus, you catch yourself 
watching an old-fashioned man with an ancient 
hat that was beaver in its time. He takes it 
off and holds it in his hand. You wonder how 
it has come to look so like its owner. It has a 
character, and the character is the man's. Then 
the heavy roll of his coat-collar, with a padded 
look, reminds you of the picture of George the 
First, the Last, and the All-the-Time, to-wit : 
George Washington. You think G. W.'s face is 
much like a tin lantern with no holes in it to let 
out the light, and about as — is it profanity, or 
ivhat is it? — about as stupid a face as there is 
going. To be sure, it has a solid look, and so 
has a round of beef. 

You look up just then, and, yonder in the 
corner facing you, sits a man of sixty, frosty, 
Octoberish, square face, double chin, hair long 
and curly, pleasant eyes, all surmounted by a 
broad-brimmed hat. You start at the resem- 
blance ; it is as much like Benjamin Franklin, 
printer, as one picture is like another. 

Then you wonder what that lady over across 
the aisle is trying to get out of that bottle with 
a knitting - needle. You watch, and she spears 
away until she brings out a little pickle. You 
notice a couple whispering and giggling, and 



ICO THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

making objects of themselves generally, and you 
marvel why, when young married people travel 
in the cars by sunlight, they don't let the honey- 
moon set, or change, or something. 

The train stops at a station among the pines 
— you are on a Wisconsin road — and little girls 
come to your window with small clusters of 
wintergreen berries, set off with a few glossy 
leaves. You buy a fresh Avooclsy taste of spring, 
and then follow the girls away to their humble 
homes among the sand-hills, and fancy how they 
live and what they hope. 

The train halts at a station in Maryland — you 
are on the train from Washington to New York — 
and dusky boys and maidens, born on the shady 
side of humanity, swarm around with neat little 
paper-boxes, with a layer of fried oysters looking 
as light and frisky as your grandmother's fritters. 
The ivory smiles are very pleasant to see, and 
before you know it you are humming " Way 
down in Alabama," and sorrowing that some of 
the sweetest melodies in the world since the 
daughters of Juclah hung their harps on the 
willows, should have dropped out of fashion like 
lead down a shot - tower, and wondering what 
poet, what historian, will yet preserve the legends 
and songs of the days of the Old Plantation. 
Then you wander away to Holy Land, and con- 
sider what punishment should be meted out to 



DREAMING ON THE CARS. 131 

the man who has just been telling us — and 
wants to be thanked for it! — that the trees those 
Jewish Girls hung their harps on — those sweet- 
voiced girls, with the blue-black hair — were not 
willows at all, but poplars ! Old-fashioned peo- 
ple call them " popples." Fancy a singer hang- 
ing her harp on a popple ! Then, there is now 
and then a lady who has a sort of petroleum- 
fortune refinement, who speaks of a poplar-tree 
as a " popular," much as if she should fancy 
that engineer is a sort of corruption of indianeer. 
All these things are dreadful, but a popple-hung 
harp is worse. 

The train pulls up at a station in Virginia, 
and a barefoot girl approaches you with flowers 
to sell — fragrant Magnolias, and the most grace- 
ful and grateful offering of all, and you fall to 
thinking if anything so beautiful will ever be 
named after you, as this magnolia was, after that 
Professor Magnol. Happy Magnol ! The flowers 
should grace his tablet in the fairest of white 
marble. Now you pass through the apple region 
of New York, and the chestnut woods of Ohio. 
You know both, by the swarms of small Buck- 
eyes bearing chestnuts, and the bits of Excelsiors 
loaded with Greenings and Baldwins. 

Then you fall to watching the man with the 
new silk hat. Every body does. It is not an 
irritated hat, for it shines like a bottle. He 



132 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

bought it yesterday, and is going a thousand 
miles immediately. The head seems to have been 
made just to have some handy place to put the 
hat. That hat thus put comes into the car. Its 
support is seated, carefully applies a thumb and 
finger to both sides of the brim, and lifts it per- 
pendicularly off, much as if his ears ran up into 
the top of it, and lie would lift it away with- 
out touching their tips. He looks at it. It 
caught a little bump as he entered the car, and 
there is the mark. He smooths it with a finger 
in a sorrowful way, reaches up, and puts it in 
the rack crown down. Then he settles to the 
journey, thinks again, elongates, and puts that 
hat brim down. This satisfies him. 

In a few minutes he rises, gives that castor 
another turn, as if it were a kaleidoscope and 
he bound to have one peep more, and deposits 
it upon its side. At the instant he is about to 
let go of it the car gives a frolicsome lurch, 
and that hat catches a jam. He withdraws it 
tenderly, and there is the scar. It looks like the 
kick of a vicious horse, but it is the work of an 
ass to wear such a thing on a journey. What 
sort of a figure would Moses have cut with a 
silk hat, in the last years — say the thirty-eighth 
of them — of his Wilderness wanderings? Well, 
the man whips out his handkerchief, and allays 
the irritation of the angry hat. He applies his 



DREAMING ON THE CARS. 133 

tongue to it as if for some healing quality, claps 
it upon his head, and, wearied with physical 
exertion and mental anxiety, falls asleep. He is 
not Jupiter, but he resembles him, for he " nods," 
and that unhappy tile tumbles, strikes the back 
of the seat with the thrum of a feeble tambou- 
rine, and bounds sepulchrally along the floor. A 
man puts his foot upon ifc in his haste to be 
neighborly, and "when the man with it" recov- 
ers the unlucky bit of head-gear, it looks like 
a short-joint of stove pipe that somebody has 
wildly hammered and wickedly sworn at because 
it would neither go inside nor outside. But the 
man with the new silk hat never falters. He 
carries a head to put the hat on. He carries a 
hat-box to put the hat in. He makes a right 
angle of himself, and sets his hat right side 
down upon his lap, as if about to play an end- 
less game of " pin." You saw him yesterday. 
There is " an eternal fitness in things," even in 
hats. 

They used to tell — in old times more than 
now — of " presenting the freedom" of this and 
that, London or Amsterdam, or what not, to 
somebody "in a gold box." That is not the 
ceremony in later days. They present you " the 
freedom" of the world on wheels, if you can pay 
for the ticket. On a California-bound train you 
met a lady. Not to indulge in any pleasant 



134 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

euphemism, she was a half century old, but then 
she was strong and womanly, and apparently no 
nearer death than when she was handed about 
in long-clothes. She was the mother of men. 
She was the wife of an English physician and 
botanist ; I should say " scientist," but if there 
is a mean word in the language, it is that same 
" scientist." It reminds me of nothing but a 
thin, offensive bug, that has been subjected to 
the pressure of a vindictive thumb-nail. She was 
unattended. She had a ticket that shut over and 
over like a Japanese book. It was good from 
London to — New Zealand ! Across two oceans, 
Atlantic and Pacific ; across the American con- 
tinent. She was bound home. She ate straw- 
berries, she said, with her husband and " the 
boys," just before she left New Zealand. She 
ate strawberries with her sister at the parting 
meal in London ; and, as she smilingly added, 
" I shall be in time for strawberries and cream 
at San Francisco." 

No more nervous anxiety about the lady borne 
on wheels around the globe, than if she had 
been walking under the palms in her Australasian 
home. You could not help thinking, as you 
regarded her pleasant face, of the Malay of the 
old Geography dressed in a towel, amidst a far- 
away and inaccessible scene of tropic luxuriance, 
only to be found after months of tossing by sea 



DREAMING ON THE CARS. 135 

and perils by land, of cannibals and beasts of 
prey ; and here she was, going directly there to 
her charming English home in the South Pacific 
seas, with that crown -jewel of the firmament, 
the Southern Cross, in sight. How pitifully 
shriveled, like a last year's filbert, is Tom 
Moore's little song about the Irish Norah, who 
went on foot and alone around the Emerald 
Isle unharmed — 

" On she went, and her maiden smile 
In safety lighted her round the Green Isle" — 

beside the tremendous arc of circumnavigation 
the Doctor's wife was describing without a 
flutter ! 

So all these trifles beguile the way, keep the 
mental watch from running down in your pocket, 
until the brakeman earns his supper by telling 
you where you can earn yours, as he shouts 
through the car, "Twenty minutes for supper!" 



186 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

'•MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT." 

There were two steamers on Lake Erie that 
were twins. They were, in their time, and not so 
long ago, models of steamboat architecture ; ele- 
gant as palaces, and in every respect as nearly 
alike as builders and artists could make them. 
Their names were Northern Indiana and Southern 
Michigan. The writer and "his next best friend" 
took passage upon one of them bound East. It 
was a mid-summer night. The moon at the full, 
and her ladyship did what all poets, since moons 
and poets were, have said she did — made day, 
" only a little paler " and lovelier, and what not. 
The steamer was running her sister's trip, that 
sister having met with an accident. The damage 
being repaired, it was proposed that, when the 
twins met on this voyage, the passengers should 
be transferred from each to the other, the sisters 
wheel about and retrace the wake they had just 
made, and so the advertised trips for the sea- 
son would come all true again. 



/ "MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT." 137 

The sea was as nearly a sea of glass as it 
ever is. The moon rode high in the heavens. 
It was just midnight when we saw the sister 
coming, decked with white and colored lights 
alow and aloft, like a queen of " the barbaric 
East" in all her jewelry. The lights from two 
stories of windows streamed out upon the air. 
The music of the band was heard. It looked 
like a city adrift, and beautiful and airy as a 
dream. Our deck was thronged with passengers, 
who saw themselves in the approaching appari- 
tion as others saw them. They were looking 
upon the steamer's counterpart and double. 

The two neared each other, came alongside in 
the middle of the sea, the planks were put out 
fore and aft, and the transfer of passengers and 
baggage began. There were two steady currents 
of human life meeting and passing on the gang- 
way. Age, youth, beauty, fashion, wealth, pov- 
erty. Bright lamps shone all around, and the 
moon over all. People looked in each other's 
eyes, glanced at each other's faces, as they met 
for an instant, sometimes gravely, sometimes 
with a smile, that nevermore in all this world 
would meet again. Now and then a pleasant 
word was uttered between strangers, but gener- 
ally the two processions were silent, almost 
thoughtful. It was a scene at once beautiful and 
impressive. The occupants of State Room B in 

18* 



188 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

the Northern Indiana found themselves occupants 
of B again in the Southern Michigan. The pas- 
sengers in the upper cabin of the one found all 
unchanged in the upper cabin of the other. 
" The places that once knew them should know 
them no more forever." The transfer was effect- 
ed with less confusion than in a congregation 
leaving a church. The bells rang a parting 
chime. The steamers wheeled, each upon her 
own route, We had died out of one world into 
another. It was a picture of life and of death 
on the moonlit sea. Such as it was, can I ever 
forget it? 

The memory of the first steamer you ever saw 
comes dimly out, like a smoky old picture. Let 
us say it was the steamer Nile, with a bronze-faced 
old sea-dog for captain ; the steamer Nile, with 
two gold crocodiles on the bow for a figure-head; 
the steamer Nile at her dock in Buffalo, and 
"up" for the City of the Straits. The rush of 
crowds and steam, the farm-wagons laden with 
household gods and goods that were backed over 
the broad gangway ; the shy country horses that 
were pulled and pushed aboard ; the Mrs. John 
Rogerses, " carrying one for every ten " by the 
old rule of addition ; the score of sheep, fright- 
ened out of their little wits, huddled together 
forward ; the sailors coiling lines and chains ; the 
close, dim cabins lined with berths; "the walking- 



"MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT:' 130 

beam " working slowly up and down ; the faint, 
hot smell of steam and oil ; the wheezy way 
with the machinery ; the little leaks of steam 
and water here and there that snuffed and hissed, 
above and below, as if everything about the craft 
were alive and generally uneasy. 

Then came the clang of the bell and the 
voice of the first mate, " All ashore that 's go- 
ing!" The captain in position on the hurricane 
deck ; a tinkle of bells in the engine-room ; the 
rasp of the lines the sailors pull in with a will ; 
a general jail delivery of steam; leviathan moves; 
she is off ; the flags unroll to the wind ; the 
band on deck strikes up " Charley over the 
Water ;" the great crowd of men and women 
and horses and drays upon the deck gets the 
size of a swarm of bees on an apple-tree limb ; 
then a mere handful of hornets ; then out of 
sight. Every time the wheels come about, the 
boat shakes as Caesar shook with that Spanish 
fever of his, when he called Titinius ; up stairs 
and down stairs an incessant rumbling and tum- 
bling that make things jingle. You are fairly 
at sea ; the air is fresh and clear, as if just 
made. The Nile was a grand affair in her day, 
but as Egyptian as the New York Tombs. She 
laid her bones on the Michigan beach one ter- 
rible night ; and her old commander, ill ashore, 
lived just long enough to hear of it. 



1-10 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Who were aboard ? Elder Alfred Bennett, for 
one — not Reverend, nor yet New Jersey Bishop 
— but Elder Bennett, with a head like Hum- 
boldt's, and holding more of celestial geography 
than the great Baron knew of earthly — a lion 
of the tribe of Judah. Of all titles for Baptist 
clergymen, "minister" seems to me the simplest 
and most suggestive. It associates them with " the 
ministering spirits " of whom we read, and whom 
we believe in. Take a young fellow from Ham- 
ilton or Rochester, who never tarried six weeks 
at Jericho, and call him Elder, as his country 
brethren and sisters always will, and there is an 
amusing incongruity about it, as if the old prov- 
erb, "the child is father of the man," had come 
literally true, and the downy Elder's father were 
a little boy somewhere, about big enough to fig- 
ure in the Millennial group of the leopard and 
the lamb. 

Father Bennett was bound for Michigan. He 
would see that accomplished Christian gentleman, 
Dr. Comstock. He would see that noble preacher 
and large-hearted man, Rev. John I. Fulton ; he 
would see Elder Powell, one of the Thirteen who 
gave a dollar apiece, and so founded Madison 
University. He would return to Utica, and meet 
that admirable Editor, Dr. A. M. Beebee, of the 
New York "Baptist Register;" in youth, office- 
mate with Washington Irving, the man of Sunny- 



"MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT." 141 

side ; in manhood, the thorough, consistent, able 
Christian editor. He would consult with Dr. 
Nathaniel Kendrick, that giant in the churches ; 
with Professor Hascall, who took Madison Univer- 
sity into an upper chamber, as the disciples gath- 
ered, and kept it till its name was strong enough 
to go abroad, and was worked for and prayed for 
all at once, as the " Ham. Lit. and Theo. Sem." 
Elders Card and Cook would come down to meet 
him from the North Woods ; Elders Galusha and 
Moore and Hartshorn from the West. They 
would all attend some Association together, and 
Elder John Peck, as clean-hearted as an angel, 
always had a word to say. He was one of the 
great noble provocatives to good works, and had 
he never achieved anything himself but that, 
the " well done, good and faithful servant ! " 
would have been the verdict. But Elder Peck 
never could say "Association." You can shut 
your eyes and hear him : " the brethren of the 
As-so-sa-shun will please to give their attention." 
All these — Elder Powell, j>erhaps, excepted — 
have gone away to the Great Convention of the 
church triumphant. 

'^Are people's memories getting shorter ? Does 
anybody remember how Dr. Kendrick used to 
begin one of his old heart-of-oak sermons? How 
he towered up behind the low pulpit, like a 
Lombardy poplar behind a fence ? How that two- 



14-2 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

story head of his reminded you of the portrait 
of Oberlin ! ( The first words came slowly and 
ponderously. Those silver-rimmed spectacles shone 
around his eyes. He laid out his work by the 
day, and not by the job. ) He told you of " the 
damning demerit of sin." He climbed rugged 
Sinai like a stout mountaineer. By-and-by away 
went the spectacles. He warmed and softened 
to the work. His words came fast. He descend- 
ed Sinai and went away to Gethsemane. And 
when he was through, and occasionally it took 
him a long time, you felt that . you had heard 
a man of remarkable power, who had yet a store 
of it in reserve — a man who could handle the 
doctrinal sledge with one hand, and never strain 
a muscle. 

Dr. Kendrick, like many of that class of old 
divines — as witness Dr. Backus, of Hamilton 
College — had a world of ready wit, that flashed 
out unexpectedly from the soberest of mouths. 
One day of the dead days, the Doctor was con- 
ducting a class in Moral Philosophy, and he 
asked a student if a man could tell a lie to a 
brute. The student thought not, and so put his 
foot in it and said " not." " Once," said the 
Doctor, in his deliberate way, " I visited a min- 
istering brother in the western part of this State. 
In the morning he took a halter, and went into 
the pasture to catch his horse. He hollowed an 



-MEET ME BY MOONLIGHT." 148 

empty hand and extended it. The horse pricked 
up his ears at the prospect, came up, thrust his 
nose into the barren hand and was captured. 
Some time after, I was called to sit in council 
in that same region. The minister alluded to 
stood charged with having made misrepresenta- 
tions to his fellow-men. I am sorry to say the 
allegations were proved true. I had seen him 
practice deception upon a quadruped. They had 
heard him tell a falsehood to a biped. Now," 
added the Doctor, " were the two acts alike, or 
did the hind legs of the quadruped kick out the 
brains of the intent?" The class laughed, but 
the student did n't say ! 



144 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XX. 



THE MAKER OF CITIES. 

No matter how carefully you freight a train, 
there is always something gets on board that 
never appears on the bill of lading. Day after 
day you see Alexandrine caravans pounding away 
to Iowa, burdened with Michigan forests that 
sawmills have laughed over in their rough, coarse 
way. It is called lumber, but it is a county 
capital, a whole village, a happy home. Score 
out with the double bars of the railroad a broad 
page of the open book of the fertile wilderness, 
sink a well somewhere that the engine can halt 
to drink, and a shanty, weather-beaten as a wasp's 
nest, will come down in a few days over the roll 
of the prairie, and treat itself to some new clap- 
boards and a coat of paint white as a sepulchre, 
and there it will stand close beside the track to 
sue the cars go by.. 

Soon, another will creep up from the bushy run 
and range itself alongside, and ten to one that it 
will shout at you in monstrous pica lettered along 



THE MAKER OF CITIES. 145 

its whole front, Metropolitan Hotel! You 
have always observed that the smaller the inn 
the bigger the title, much after the fashion of 
the naturalists who " call names," and denomi- 
nate a harmless little chimney-swallow an Hir- 
undo Pelasgia ! Then more houses, a church with 
a chuckle-headed belfry, a school-house, a store, 
all white as this week's washing. Then one 
money - purse of a mail-bag will be thrown off 
from a passing train upon the depot platform, and 
another handed on as easily as a woman's work- 
pocket. 

The village is christened Athens, it has a 
P.M., and when a little village grows to have 
a P.M., it is getting pretty well along towards 
A.M. Day has fairly broke. Un tilled breadths 
of prairie round about begin to show scars. The 
plow is busy. They set out trees, and settle a 
minister and hire a schoolma'am. They fit up a 
hall over a store, and call it Apollo. A man 
comes along with a composing-stick in his pocket 
and starts a newspaper. It is the Clarion. The 
editor thanks one man for a pumpkin and mea- 
sures it. He confesses to a turkey and acknowl- 
edges the corn. He says he is amazed at the 
great West. A young lawyer gets off the cars, 
and immediately another. A solitary lawyer is 
useless. What would Robinson Crusoe have done 
had he been an attorney ? His story Avould have 

19 



146 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

been brief, and no red tape to tie it with. No, 
a couple of lawyers are like two halves of a pair 
of shears. You need them both for the cutting 
purposes of the legal instrument. Two doctors 
are there already. Then an artist arrives with 
his house on wheels, and backs it upon a vacant 
lot next to the " Metropolitan," and there it is, 
with a monstrous lobster - like eye in the top, 
and the girls and their " fellows " come in from 
around about to be taken — come in their best ; 
great healthy girls, wearing three or four dresses 
apiece, each shorter than the other, and all 
flounced, or fluted, or something. 

The railway has brought the fashions. It also 
brought that Chinese abomination, a gong. The 
" Metropolitan" has one, and it frightened an 
innocent man into running away with a span of 
horses, and they never got him. It also threw 
a feeble woman into convulsions who had been 
reading Gordon's Adventures in Africa — not the 
"lord" of that ilk. She either thought it was 
a lion or she was in Africa, but she never ex- 
plained. The rival hotel, called " The Orient," 
because it is located in the Occident, and com- 
pleted yesterday, has not attained to gongs. It 
only rings a bell. 

A barber arrives. His fathers, some of them, 
were from the coast of Guinea. He is table- 
waiter at the Metropolitan. Likewise an artist 



THE MAKER OF CITIES. 147 

on leather, with dramatic tendencies, for he 
strikes an attitude and cries, "What boots it!" 
and then laughs like a general alarm in a poul- 
try-yard. He is ostler at the Metropolitan , also 
porter. He punishes a fiddle for the dancers at 
the Apollo. He shaves. 

The Methodists came first. They have a choir 
with a pitch-pipe to it. Next the Baptists, with 
a melodeon. They both will try for an organ 
next year. Tlie Examiner has a club bigger 
than can be cut anywhere within four miles of 
Athens. 

And this Athens is as much the product of 
the locomotive as a puff of steam. It made things 
possible. The next thing the prince of modern 
genii does, is to bolt the track without tumbling 
into the ditch. It goes across -lots to some 
sleepy little ante-railroad Corners, that was the 
county-seat aforetime, and trails the Court-house, 
by a figure of speech, back to Athens, and it 
becomes the Capital ! All the boys are aching 
to do something whereby they may get into the 
new jail. At last the Sheriff catches a rogne 
and locks him up, and the boys are satisfied. 
The thin lawyer with the thin tin sign becomes 
Judge, and also fatter. It was a graveyard they 
had over at the Corners, a straggling place where 
people lay clown wherever they pleased, and no- 
body said a word. Things are not thus in 



148 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Athens. They have laid out a — cemetery, with 
some pretension to beauty, and have traced it 
off with paths and avenues like the lines upon 
the palm of a hand. They also have a hearse. 
So has the Corners, but then Athens has plumes, 
when people die that can afford it. 

There are a briskness of step and a precision 
of speech about the people of a railway creation 
that you never find in a town that is only ac- 
cessible to a stage-driver, and where they go 
sauntering about like a Connecticut one-horse 
chaise. There it is always three o'clock till it 
is four. In Athens never. From the depot with 
its time-table to the dusky factotum of the 
" Metropolitan," everybod}^ carries a watch. He 
compares it with the standard at the depot once 
a day. He consults it upon all possible occa- 
sions. If you begin to preach, he times you 
from the text. If you marry him to somebody, 
he whips out his repeater, and sees just how 
long you were about it. The second-hand, so 
useless in a lazy old town, is magnified in im- 
portance to a crowbar. You ask him the time, 
and he tells you " Number Six, due here at two 
o'clock and one minute, has just gone. I 'm 
thirty seconds slow. It 's two o'clock and four 
minutes ! " And there you have the time almost 
accurate enough for an astronomer. The loco- 
motive is an accomplished educator. It teaches 



THE MAKER OF CITIES. 149 

everybody that virtue of princes we call punc- 
tuality. It waits for nobody. It demonstrates 
what a useful creature a minute is in the econ^ 
omy of things. 

The West is full of Athenses that were. They 
have grown greater and better. They star the 
prairies as constellations the heavens. They have 
grown more modest and less pretentious with 
time. Villages, like girls, have " a hateful age." 
There is a period, too, in the life of villages, 
when they resemble that red-nightcapped carpen- 
ter, the woodpecker — they are biggest when first 
hatched. 



150 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XXL 



A CABOOSE EIDE. 



Has it ever happened to you to be left some- 
where, and nothing to get away upon but a 
freight train ? And did the train happen to be 
running on an Express train's time, and did you 
make the flitting in the night ? If " yes," you 
remember it. The writer was at Friendship, in 
the State of New York. It adjoins the town of 
Amity, whose post-office ought to be Fraternity. 
What a dreadful thing this " calling names " has 
become ! Down that same Erie Road is Scio, 
and not a man of them can tell where Homer 
was buried. Then we have Cuba and Castile, 
and nothing Spanish or Castilian in either of 
them, except the Castile soap at the druggist's. 
Avon, without Shakspeare ; Caledonia, and no- 
body to bless the Duke of Argyle for a scratch- 
ing-post ; Warsaw, that Campbell does not sing 
of in his " Pleasures of Hope ; " Ararat, and no 
sign of Noah's ark ; Waterloo, that Bonaparte 



A CABOOSE RIDE. 151 

never lost ; Cato, Ovid, Camillus, Marcellus, and 
all the rest of them. 

To return to the freight train : You climb 
aboard, and entering the caboose sit down before 
you mean to, the thing giving a plunge just 
before you are ready. Four or five men are dis- 
posed about the car. They are drovers. You 
think you have blundered into a barnyard. Those 
men have their outdoor voices with them. Their 
frequent conversations with herds have made 
them boisterous and breezy as the month of 
March. The society of cattle is not always re- 
fining, especially of cattle to kill. You do n't 
see anybody reading poetry. The stove burns 
wood, and not coal, but the car is smutty for 
all that. They use many good words, but they 
do n't seem to understand the arrangement of 
them. You begin to be sorry you did not tarry 
at Jericho for the passenger train. But these 
men are kind-hearted. One of them moves along 
and lets you sit within six inches of the stove 
that, unless like a blackberry, it is red when it 
is green, must be dead ripe. 

The car is a short caboose, fashioned like a 
small, ill-shaped back kitchen, and it has no 
more wheels than a one-horse wagon, which gives 
it an uneasy and suggestive way on the track. 
A brakeman sits with his head swung out at a 
window. The conductor sits with his watch in 



152 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

his hand. Nobody has any business there at all. 
The engineer is doing his best to make a dis- 
tant station, and get upon the side-track before 
the Express wants the road. You find this out 
by degrees. It makes you feel light, but not 
airy. The kitchen rocks like a cradle for a dozen 
rods, and then jounces the light out and the 
water-barrel over and your hat off, and the stove 
rattles like a smithy in a driving time. Then 
it gathers itself up like a salient goat, and 
bounces against the bumper of the next car and 
something snaps. No matter. 

j?ho ^rain swings around a curve, and you feel 
as you did years ago when you were the last 
boy on the string in the game of " snap the 
whip." You steady your lower jaw a little, and 
ask the conductor if he is going to stop before 
he stops for good, to-wit : meets the Express, and 
he says, " Genesee ! " It occurs to you that he 
has mentioned the very place you are bound for, 
though you never heard of it before. The con- 
ductor informs you it is safe to bet we are "just 
dusting," and you believe him — the only safe 
thing about the train. It is thirty miles an hour. 
Another head is hung out of a window, and you 
think you '11 try to count fence-posts. It does n't 
happen to be a fence, but a stockade ; and as 
for telegraph-poles, you have seldom observed 
them thicker to the mile. You look forward, and 



A CABOOSE AIDE. 158 

see lights down the track. Drawing in like a 
turtle, you tell the conductor. " What is it, 
Joe?" and the brakeraan replies " NothinV 
The conductor puts his watch to his ear. Has 
it stopped ? With rattle and roar the engineer 
keeps launching the train into the midnight. A 
shrill shriek of the locomotive whistles you up, 
and you are on your feet like a cat. The 
brakeman runs up his little iron ladder, the speed 
slackens, the train comes to a dead halt. It is 
Genesee, and one grateful passenger leaves that 
frantic caboose, to set foot in it, as he fervently 
prays, " nevermore." 

20 



154 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XXII. 



HATCHING OUT A WOMAN. 

When the necromancer turns farmer, sows a 
few kernels of wheat in a little tin-box of earth, 
claps on the cover, sends a few sparks of elec- 
tricity through it, whips off the lid and shows 
you the green blades an inch and a half long, in 
a minute and a half, it is a phenomenon, but not 
a miracle. You can see something quite as mar- 
velous in the World on Wheels any day. Enter 
a well-filled car in " the wee small hours ayont 
the twal." The light is dim but not religious 
with the uncertain glimmer of candles or the 
smoky flare of kerosene, which ought to be ban- 
ished from every civilized and Christian road. 
The seats are heaped with shapeless piles of 
clothes. Folks are shut up like jack - knives or 
bagged like game. Here and there a head is vis- 
ible, swaying about when there is n't any wind, 
as if everything had "lodged" except a bearded 
stalk now and then. By-and-by the gray, cold, 
unspeculative dawn begins to show at the East 



HATCHING OUT A WOMAN. 156 

windows, and there is a stir among the bundles. 
A man with hair over his front like a Shetland 
pony's mane emerges from a blanket. A boy 
with the head of a distaff changes ends. A 
girl blossoms out in the next seat. 

But there is one large heap of clothes that you 
watch, and they are good ones. A dainty hat 
with a feather in it swings from the rack above 
by one string. A muff like a well - to - do cat 
reposes in the wire manger. The bundle appears 
to be composed of cloaks, shawls, and a lap-robe. 
It is shaped like an egg, and it is an egg. First 
one shawl gives a little lift, then another. There 
is a slight surge of a cloak. Off goes a shawl. 
A snug gaiter with a foot in it emerges at one 
end, and a disheveled head at the other. Forth 
comes a hand, and at last the chrysalis is rent, 
and the occupant is hatched out before your 
eyes. But it is anything but a butterfly. It is a 
crumpled, drowsy piece of womanhood, who slept 
in her head but not in her hair. 

The trying, pitiless light of early morning 
plays upon her terrifically, and she knows it. 
It amuses you to watch her under your eyelids. 
She brings forth from her reticule a liver-shaped 
device, and she hangs it on behind, like the fen- 
der of a canal -boat, just over her combativeness 
and philo-progenitiveness, and what not. Then 
she arranges and sorts out curls and ringlets for 



1;")G THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

different organs. You ought to see that head. 
It grows like a soap-bubble. She claps a love 
of a friz on her self-esteem, which allies her to 
angels ; a coil of #, curl upon her firmness, which 
brings her, sometimes, within neighborly distance 
of donkeys ; she borders her brow with ringlets, 
trails a braid about her inhabitiveness and con- 
structiveness, touches up the tress on her venera- 
tion, and the head is artistically complete. She 
washes her face with a handkerchief, rights her 
collar, shakes out the creases, tosses the little 
hat upon the top of all things, and is ready for 
breakfast. Who talks of necromantic ivheat, when 
here is a human flower hatched from an awk- 
ward bundle in less than thirty minutes ! 

When you take a train with a harem in it — 
I use the word in its originally clean sense — 
and you have no personal interest in the harem, 
you are apt to fare badly. The train is meant 
where the women are sorted out for one car, 
and what is left is just turned into another. It 
is a vicious fashion, and fosters the art of lying. 
There goes a young man at the heels of a lady 
whom he never saw before, or spoke to in his 
life, and he is carrying a spick-and-span new 
bandbox. My word for it, it is as empty as a 
church contribution-box on Saturday afternoon. 
He bought that box for precisely that emergen- 
cy. The lady ascends the platform. So does the 



HATCHING OUT A WOMAN. 157 

bandbox. The brakeman opens the door, and the 
young man slips in unquestioned, and secures a 
comfortable seat. He means to study for the 
ministry, and he has been lying by bandbox ! 

There is another man. He appears to be a 
good man. You are sure he is, and he stands 
where the brakeman can see him, and touches 
his hat to a window of the harem where nobody 
is sitting, and then, with a little smiling affec- 
tionate haste, he skips up the steps and says, 
" Please let me in a minute ! " and in he goes. 
That unfortunate man never beheld a face in 
that car in all his life. The more you think of 
it the more vicious the fashion seems. .It does 
not benefit the ribbons, and is a positive damage 
to the whiskers. Pen men up together, and if 
they do not act like cattle it will be in spite 
of the pen ! Women sprinkled through the cars 
keep the train upon its honor, if not upon the 
track, and elevate the lumbering thing from a 
common carrier to an educator. 

Flying bedrooms are among the crowning 
achievements of railway travel. They are gor- 
geous. They remind you — the most of them — 
of the Hall of Representatives at Washington, 
which in its turn suggests a Chinese pagoda. 
They are luxuries. If you do n't mind plunging 
endwards through your dreams at forty miles an 
hour ; and if you do n't care whom you sleep 



158 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

with ; and if you never catch cold ; and if you 
have no "reasonable doubt" as to getting out, 
provided the bed-room is mistaken for a dice-box, 
some night, and you are sure you will not come 
within an ace of throwing the deuce, there is 
nothing like them. Snores in many languages are 
let loose upon you, and feet from many boots. 
The porter has an appetite for boots. He sits 
up at night to get yours, no matter where you 
put them, and there he is in the morning, the 
boots in one hand and nothing in the other. It 
is. pleasant, also, to have the drapery of your 
couch whisked one side every few minutes, just as 
you have dropped off into a doze, and a strange 
hand passed over your face, by somebody blun- 
dering about in quest of his berth. 

Flying drawing-rooms deserve what winged bed- 
rooms need — unmitigated praise. The clank of 
wheels is shut out. You exult to the angles of 
your elbows, because there is room for them. 
You can go about in your revolving chair like 
a shingle chanticleer upon a barn -ridge. You 
read quietly, write comfortably, converse easily. 
It is home adrift. 



A FLANK MOVEMENT. 159 



CHAPTER XXIII. 



A FLANK MOVEMENT. 

In war and peace all people are afraid of a 
flank movement. General Sherman, though he 
never quite found out what newspapers are for, 
did discover that the Federal strength was in 
the enemy's flanks. In other words, if the Con- 
federate army had been finished off prematurely 
like a pictorial cherub, he would have had noth- 
ing to punish. It is said to be a dreadful strain 
upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing ! In 
a railway car a man is apt to be flanked by 
somebody — a small army of observation in the 
rear. 

Take a man who has a fine sense of feeling- 
all over, and put two women behind him — one 
woman thus located is comparatively harmless, 
but two are a terror, for they can talk about 
you! — and he begins to wonder if his collar is 
clean behind, and how he looks just back of his 
ears, and whether a stray string, or something, 
may not be sticking up above his coat, though 
he cannot remember that he ever had anything 



160 THE WORLD OAT WHEELS. 

there to be tied. Then he tries to remember 
whether he brushed his hair neatly behind, in 
his haste this morning, lest he should be behind 
himself. Just at that minute there is a coin- 
cidence ; a little laugh from the ladies on the 
next seat, and footsteps on the rim of his ear ! 
It is mid-winter, and it cannot be a fly. If he 
■were only sure it was a tarantula, he would be 
happy. They laugh again, and again that small 
promenader. He knoivs his head harbors nothing 
but ideas, and yet a trespasser may have come 
from foreign pastures, for all that. He wishes 
he knew — that he could see himself as " ithers 
see" him at that particular minute. 

Can it possibly be of the race that Burns 
discovered upon the woman's Sunday bonnet ? 
He dares not put his hand up, lest they should 
observe it. He feels his ears grow red and 
warm. He wishes they would get hot enough 
to scorch that creature's feet. Still those small 
footsteps. He has heard, in his time, the tramp 
of armed men. It was sublimer, but not half 
so terrible. Again that little laugh behind him, 
and rising in his desperation he goes to the rear 
of the car, claps his hand to the burning ear, 
and secures a single hair like a bit of a watch- 
spring, that had coiled on the rim of the human 
sea-shell, and counterfeited feet that his fancy 
built upon, as Agassiz built two-story monsters 
out of a rafter or a rib that somebody exhumed 



A FLANK MOVEMENT. 161 

and sent to him. And those ladies had never 
seen him at all ! 

If a man could always have the world in his 
front, courage would not be much of a virtue, 
if it ever is. There are a great many worthless 
things passed about as genuine. Now, that little 
Spartan scamp who stole the fox, hid it under 
his robe, and let the creature relieve him of his 
liver rather than be found out and lose the 
plunder, is handed about with a label to him, 
as a sort of pocket-model of fortitude. I dug it 
out of Greek when I was a boy, and was taught 
it was worth finding. Why, he was nothing but 
a miserable little thief, that could n't speak a 
word of English ! So, if courage is a virtue, the 
brave little wren carries more virtue to the ounce 
than anything going. The writer knows a pub- 
lic speaker who trembles as did the king who 
saw something written on the wall, if he is com- 
pelled to pass through the body of the house 
to reach the platform, and yet always faces the 
audience with perfect self-possession. He has 
been known to flounder through an unbroken 
snow-drift, and climb in by a window, simply to 
avoid the flank movement that took all his cour- 
age out of him. When you see a man turn a 
cold shoulder to a chilling wind instead of squarely 
facing it, you may count him among the victims 
of rheumatism, and not among the philosophers. 



1132 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 



LIGHT AND SHADE. 



The saddest train upon which the writer ever 
took passage was the Hospital Train, with its 
maimed and mangled burden, that ran from the 
still, white tents of Stevenson, Ala., to Nash- 
ville, Tenn., just after the battle of Chickamauga. 
There was no lack of ventilation, for some of 
the cars were platforms — the kind that make 
Martyrs, but not Presidents. Not much finish in 
precious woods anywhere that you could see. It 
rained heavily and persistently through the twelve 
hour trip, and there the wounded lay strewn 
about on the platforms, and packed away in the 
box-cars. But you heard less complaint than is 
made any day on a palace-train because one re- 
fractory rose-leaf is crumpled. The suffering was 
silent, and all the more terrible because it was 
so. The stricken boys had started for home, and 
there was a strange, ghastly cheerfulness upon 
their faces, that was sadder than sadness. They 



LIGHT AND SHADE. 163 

talked about "God's country," whither they were 
bound, till your heart ached to think how many 
of them would find "God's acre" before they 
reached the blessed North. 

The bearing of that wounded brigade was won- 
derfully glorified with the grace of patience. It 
taught you what splendid stuff human nature is 
made of. They tell about men of iron, and 
nerves of steel, and look as if they thought they 
had said something — as if there were anything 
quite so good to make a man of as the flesh 
that can quiver and the nerve that can twinge. 
Those cars on that Chattanooga Road were bad 
enough, though the reader cannot get the idea 
unless he amuses himself by riding upon a lively 
trip-hammer ; but of all wheeled contrivances, 
the ambulance that was used in the late war is 
the most spiteful. You would naturally think it 
"an invention of the enemy " — that he had de- 
vised it for the special purpose of finishing the 
people he had not quite killed with gunpowder. 
The jolty, jerky thing, with wolf-trap springs that 
snap at every inequality in the road, and send 
waves of pain through the shattered frames of 
its occupants, is, for a merciful device, certainly 
the most cruel. Be our prayer, that neither 
hospital train nor ambulance will be needed ever- 
more in all the land ! 



164 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Did you ever see troops of young swallows 
peppering the southern slope of a broad-roofed 
barn, just as they are making ready to leave for 
a sunnier clime ? What confusion of happy 
tongues, what half-human chatter and frolic. If 
you would see the same picture later in the sea- 
son, after the swallows are all gone, just board a 
passenger train in December upon a road lined with 
schools for girls, like the Chicago and Milwaukee, 
when the flocks are let loose and bound home 
for the holidays. The birds are gayer and 
brighter, and worth a gallon of swallows every 
one of them, no matter whether swallows are 
higher than sparrows or not — half a farthing 
apiece — but they recall the picture on the barn- 
slope, till the girls and the birds seem to be 
twittering over the same dish of joyous expec- 
tation. 

•You had left Milwaukee a little dull and a 
trifle surly, but as the train halts along at those 
beautiful villages where the dove-cotes are, and 
the merry creatures throng aboard, and captivate 
you and take the train, and fill it with laughter 
and ribbons, and jaunty little hats about as big 
as the palm of your hand, and sit clown three 
in a seat, when their flounces will let them, and 
talk all at once and all the time, then you, too, 
brighten up and grow human, and wish you 
were a boy or a girl again, so that you could 



LIGHT AND SHADE. 165 

see things rose-colored, and think it blessing 
enough to live, and be happy without a plan. 
Whoever says gravely to himself, " I am going 
to be happy to-day," is pretty sure to have a 
sober-sided time of it. I do not think anybody 
can toe happiness, as the children used to toe a 
crack when they stood up to spell. A great 
deal of the commodity comes to a man when he 
is not looking for it, just as a side-glance some- 
times reveals a star that the astronomer had 
been vainly seeking with the direct gaze. 

The Lord has arranged things wisely for our 
mere physical delight. He has not planted all 
the violets in the world in one place, neither 
has He fenced in the roses between particular 
lines and parallels of latitude and longitude, nor 
fashioned them to grow up close under our noses. 
But we go carelessly along, and we get a whiff 
of the violets down there in the grass, and the 
lilacs over yonder in the yard, and the roses in 
the fence corner, and they all go to make up the 
fragrance and the beauty of the day, though we 
had not been looking for any of them. It is the 
indirect ray from everything, whether it be the 
sun or the drop of dew, that unravels and makes 
visible the beauty of the world. 

There is a great deal said about spheres. A 
planetary stranger would think that about half 
the world were engaged in getting a lesson in 



1(50* THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

Spherical Trigonometry — man's sphere and wo- 
man's sphere. Most of the unhappiness, uneasi- 
ness, and tendency to bolt spheres, is due to an 
impression many people unconsciously entertain, 
that the Lord did not understand His business 
when He made the Gardener and his wife — that 
he could have made a better job of it. Take 
an open-browed, clean-hearted girl, blessed with 
a fair share of beauty of some kind, and then 
make her believe that she is about the neatest 
piece of work the Lord ever made, and keep her 
believing so, and you will have a woman by-and- 
by, if heaven does n't want her before, who will 
never trouble herself much about spheres and. tan- 
gents, or any other problems of Social Geometry, 
but will just brighten and sweeten the world all 
the days of her life. 

The day those school-girls came into the car 
there was a sour-visaged man in it whom you 
had been watching. His features were all hud- 
dled together — he had done it himself — his eyes, 
nose, mouth and chin all puckered to a focus of 
chronic anxiety. He looked as if- he had been 
getting those features all ready to be poured 
through a tunnel into a vinegar - barrel. You 
were curious to observe the effect of the merry 
inroad upon him. At first not a movement. He 
seemed as sulphuric as ever. Some of the girls 
threw little smiles his way, though not at him, 



LIGHT AND SHADE. 167 

and some of them hit him, and he began to 
watch them. They were too many for him, and 
he concluded he would n't run into the vinegar- 
barrel just yet. 

It was curious to see that small mass-meeting 
of features break up and distribute themselves 
around his face, each in its place, until his coun- 
tenance got about as broad as a sun - dial, and 
about as bright as the dial does when the sun 
shines on it. He had been thinking for a long 
time that he needed medicine of some kind. As 
he would have worded it himself, " he felt a 
good eel out of kilter," but it was young folks 
he needed all the while, and nothing at all that 
a druggist could sell him. 



168 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 



CHAPTER XXV. 



PRECIOUS CARGOES. 



The richest cargo in the world is a cargo of 
Time, and the locomotive was made to draw it. 
Yesterday I saw a man who tugged his house- 
hold goods and gods from East to West in thirty 
days. To be sure, the roads had three dimen- 
sions, length, breath and — thickness; — who ever 
knew a migrant to flit in pleasant weather? — 
but he drove early and late, and tired out the 
family dog and took him aboard — the dog that 
had developed his muscles in digging out wood- 
chucks and shaking pole - cats to pieces in the 
Catskills, He has made that journey since in 
thirty hours, and his account between the old 
time and the new stands 1 : 24 — a pretty for- 
midable balance when the commodity is a thing 
so precious as time. 

Take that piece of animated nature called the 
commercial traveler, who slings his little knap- 
sack under his left shoulder-blade and says, "the 
world is mine oyster!" He is as much a pro- 



PRECIOUS CARGOES. 169 

duct of the locomotive as a puff of steam. He is 
a wholesale store in a pair of boots. The great 
house in New York, Chicago, Cincinnati, is trun- 
dled about the world by sample, and he girds up 
his loins and keeps it company. The engine has 
made him possible. He is about as wonderful as 
the Arabian Genius that came out of the little 
bottle and clouded all the land. Let us say he 
travels fifteen thousand miles a year ; that he 
keeps upon the track ten years without break- 
ing his neck ; that he begins his commercial 
raids at the age of twenty-two, unships his little 
knapsack, buys out the wholesale house he 
"represented," and retires from the road at 
thirty-two, thus making a beginning so noble 
that it fairly laps over upon the ending. 

Now, could you set back his almanac for him 
about a generation, a couple of hundred years 
would be little enough to accomplish the work, 
and lie must bequeath the unfinished business 
to his great-grandson — a legacy from his dead and 
gone ancestor. Here he is now, with the work 
done, all the silver on his diiiing-tahle, and not 
a thread of it in his hair! Those witches and 
wizards of locomotives have drawn a cargo of 
more than two centuries about the world for 
him, upon which he could draw at will, and his 
draft was honored every time. They have made 
his days "long in the land," no matter what 
22 



170 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

lie thought of his father ; made a young Methu- 
selah of him, two hundred and fifty years old if 
a day, and the grasshopper not a grain heavier. 

The modern cars have taken aboard what was 
little thought of in the early history of locomo- 
tives — breathing material. Ventilation has by no 
means attained perfection, but remember the low, 
narrow boxes, almost as close as mortality's 
" long home," that they used to call coaches, in 
which people made sardines of themselves, and 
cauoht colds and influenzas and asthmas and ca- 
tarrhs and other musical instruments, and you 
will not feel like being very querulous over the 
discomforts of modern locomotion. That ancient 
fashion — it was the best the stupid old world 
knew — of boxing a man up in cars full of ni- 
trogen, was an abomination to chemistry and 
comfort. A stove in the center, a sort of altar 
for the rendering of unseemly offerings that Sir 
Walter Raleigh is said to be answerable for, used 
to form a torrid zone about eight feet broad, sub- 
dued into a pair of temperates, and eked out at 
the ends with a couple of frigids, and there you 
have the climate of the old railroads. Then, 
what with those who broke fast on bolognas and 
the blessed vegetable that used to keep the girls 
of TVeathersfleld a-crying, you had all the odors 
of Cologne except cologne. 

Did you ever watch a kitten under a receiver 
when the air-pump began to rob her of her 



PRECIOUS CARGOES. 171 

breathing material ? — the signs of distress, the 
furry sides working like a busy bellows, the be- 
wildered looking about for help? If it was a 
talented kitten, perhaps she discovered the fatal 
orifice in the brazen floor whence her life was 
escaping, and clapped her paw upon it, as cats 
have done before now, and so stopped the rob- 
bery and won respect and saved her life. This 
time the victim is not a cat but a king, to-wit, 
one of the American sovereigns, secured in an 
old-time car, with nothing aboard to make breath 
of. It is curious to see how he degenerates by 
a series of melancholy transitions into a miserable 
vegetable. You put him into the car brisk and 
bright as nature will let him be. The sixth hour 
he grows irritable ; the tenth, dull. His fancy 
leaves him in the fifteenth. He begins to think 
how far it is to dinner, and how much he will 
eat, for he is just passing through the brute 
region, on his way from humanity down to vege- 
tation, where his epitaph might be, "gone to 
grass." The eighteenth hour he is surly; the 
twentieth, dumb. The twenty-fourth " does " for 
him and the metamorphosis is complete, the 
necromantic experiment is over. He cannot re- 
member who wrote Milton's " Paradise Lost." 
He forgets the name of the principal character 
in Hamlet. He runs up a few rounds of the 
multiplication table just to see if they are all 
there He ceases to think at all, looks steadilv 



172 THE WORLD ON WHEELS. 

out of the window and sees nothing. He ceases 
to count anything in the census. He is not so 
much as Nebuchadnezzar. He is grass. 

But " all things have become new." What 
speed in the engine ; what priceless cargoes of 
time and oxygen upon the train ; how fast and 
long we live in a little while ! Let us be glad. 
Uneasy people sometimes wish they had been 
born in the days of Alexander, or Moses, or 
Methuselah, or somebody who looms up giganti- 
cally in the mists of history. It is better to live 
in the days of the Steam-engine. It has con- 
quered more worlds than Alexander, traversed 
vaster wildernesses than the Israelite, and re- 
claimed them as it went ; and behold, by the 
power of the Engine we live to be hundreds of 
years old, and never give it a thought ! 

Studying life on the railroad train and looking 
into a kaleidoscope are somewhat alike. You can- 
not exhaust the figures in the one, and almost 
every turn of the wheels brings up a new and 
curious combination in the other. And so I find 
m} T self wondering why I omitted this, forgot that, 
and ever thought I could possibly be content 
with the few chance glimpses at thirty miles an 
hour that are here recorded. 

The Engineer has rung the bell, the Conductor 
has pulled the cord, the Passenger Train has 
gone. There is nothing now to be done except 
to ship by a dull freight train a little heavy 




(173) 



BAGGAGE 



CHAPTER I. 



MY STARRY DAYS. 



There are some stars to which, in my boy- 
hood, I was wont to lay special claim. Perhaps 
everybody is. I never thought of their being out 
of the jurisdiction of the State of New York, 
where I first began to "see stars," not meaning 
those early experiments upon the glare ice of 
Leonard's Pond, when my heels went up like 
Mercury's, and my head went clown like the flint- 
lock of an old Queen's arm. One large ripe star 
used to tremble just over the edge of Clinton's 
Woods — I loved to fancy it would lodge some- 
time, and I would go a-nutting for worlds as I 
did for beech-nuts — a star with such a warm and 
human sort of light, so like an earthly fire-side 
somewhere, with the door open, that it always 
inspired a home feeling, and I counted it as much 



(175) 



176 BAGGAGE. 

among the belongings of that particular landscape 
as the daisies in the pasture, and not more than 
a breath or two farther off. 

I have heard since that it has charmed no end 
of poets to write verses to it that never were 
sent ; that it is called Venus, when it deserves an 
honest womanly name — Mary or Rachel, Ruth or 
Eve. Is it not strange that we christen a great 
beautiful world as we would not dare name any- 
body's daughter, unless her mother had an extra 
pair of feet in daily use, or her father were con- 
tent to be called " Towzer " — at least now that 
the turbaned " aunty," who opened her mouth 
like a piano and laughed clear across the planta- 
tion, has been " amended " and counted in among 
the souls to be saved. 

If the heathen began the nomenclature of the 
skies, pray let it be ended by Christians. There 
are no Alexanders about, to be crying for new 
worlds. They are glittering into the field of view 
every night or two, and the business of naming 
goes on after the fashion of dead and dusty 
idolaters. Had Adam made such work " calling 
names" when the Lord bade him, he would have 
been sent down on his knees there in Eden to 
weed onions unto tears and repentance. Let our 
star-finders give them a hint — those keen fellows 
who shall, by -and -by, roll that date of theirs, 
Anno Domini 3,000, over and over like a school 



MY STARRY DAYS. 177 

of dolphins — that we, at least, have abandoned 
Latin and Greek gods ; that our poultry are quite 
safe for all anybody in America, be he fool or 
philosopher, ordering a cock served up to iEscu- 
lapius. 

But if ever anything thoroughly belonged to the 
owner, the heavenly Dipper — that magnificent 
utensil knobbed at the angles and riveted along 
the handle with seven stars — belonged to me. I 
should have clutched it long ago if, like the dag- 
ger of Shakespeare's man, it had only hung " the 
handle toward my hand;" as much household ware 
as its humble cousin forty times removed, that 
hung by a little chain beside the well. From 
that celestial dipper — or so I thought — the dews 
were poured out gently on the summer world. 
It was the only thing about the house perfectly 
safe from thieves and rust ; for was it not of a 
truth a treasure laid up in heaven ? And how 
sadly right I was ; for there, only last night, 
blazed the Dipper as if it were fire-new, while 
the home of my boyhood has faded out like a 
dream and vanished away. 

There was yet another trinket of domesticated 
heaven, if I may say so. No matter what name 
the Chaldeans called it by, to me it will always 
be the star in the well. A gray sweep swayed 
up above that well like an acute accent ; and 
in its round liquid disc, that gave me glance for 

23 



178 BAGGAGE. 

glance, I used to see sometimes the double of 
a star straight from the top of heaven. It 
was plainer than any pearl that " ever lay under 
Oman's green water." They that drank at that 
well in the old days, long ago sat down by the 
river of crystal in the Kingdom of Life , but 
its dark disc, like a strange unwinking eye, still 
watches the zenith from its depths, and some- 
times a star is let down into it till it kindles 
as if lighted by a thought. 

That handful of household stars is a part of 
my heritage. No matter how dim the night, 
how clisastered the sky, I close my eyes and they 
yet rise strangely beautiful and shine across the 
cloudy world even as they always shone since their 
illustrious kindred began to sing together. The 
prayer of the athletic savage was " for light." 
But our terrestrial day is only a veil thick-woven 
of sunbeam warp and woof. The dewy hand of 
Nicrht withdraws it. and lo ! the heavens are all 
abroad ! Let Ajax mend his prayer, and let the 
burden be for calm unclouded night. 

But there is another constellation not less 
precious than my sidereal possessions — a cluster 
of day-stars as resplendent as if they were 
called Arcturus every one. They shine with a 
warm and genial ray — undimmed, thank God ! 
by any care or cloud. Time is not, as most men 
think, a natural product. It is only fragments 



MY STARRY DAYS. 179 

of duration fashioned into shape. The whirling 
worlds of God are so much burnished machinery 
for making times and seasons. They ripple the 
everlasting current of white and dumb duration. 
It swells in ages, undulates in years ; and all 
along the ceaseless solemn flow, sparkle like syl- 
lables of song the days of all our lives. The 
tumbling planets end their work, and man's be- 
gins. Whoever stamps the image and superscrip- 
tion of a worthy deed, a sterling truth, a splen- 
did fact, upon a day, has hallowed and bright- 
ened it evermore. The day a man is born who 
rallies the sluggish race and puts it on its honor 
for all time, stands out from the rank and file 
of the dull almanac and halts you like a senti- 
nel. The day a man is dead who gave some 
other day a might and meaning it never had 
before, is strewn with immortelles and borne 
abreast with marching ages. 

Take a twenty-fifth of January, one hundred 
and eleven years ago — standing there in its 
place as plain as yesterday, illuminated all over, 
like an old saint's legend, with Scottish song that 
comes to a man like the beat of his heart, — 
and tell me if you think it worth while for 
anybody to be born on that recurring day with 
any hope of wresting it from " Robert Burns, 
Poet"? True, the Ettrick Shepherd saw 4;he 
light on a twenty-fifth , but the best we can 



ISO BAGGAGE. 

do for him is to let his "Skylark" warble up 
to the top of the wintry morning if it can. 

The Man of Mount Vernon endowed Februa- 
ry, that cheapest of the months, with a twenty- 
second it never owned before ; took what had 
been a blank white leaf between a brace of 
nights, so bent back upon it the radiant truth 
of all his life, that, independent of the sun, it 
shines right on — the radiant truth that the man 
of truest symmetry is the man of truest power. 

And what more can any one do for that sev- 
enth of February than he did to be born in it, 
whom Dombey shall lead gently by the hand far 
down another age, for whom Little Nell shall 
plead with a forgetful world, and who left us 
the voice of Tiny Tim for a perpetual benedic- 
tion — " God bless us, Every one!" 

The old-time Fourth. 

I would not give much for the American who 
has nowhere in the year a day domed like a 
tower and filled with a chime of bells. Now, the 
Fourth of July is one of my days with stars 
in it, and bells withal, that shine and ring and 
roar out of my childhood with an eloquence that 
always sets the heart pounding with the concussion 
of the anvil and the feet keeping step to the 
frolic of Yankee Doodle. It lights up the time 



MY STARRY DAYS. 181 

when you could stand upright under life's East- 
ern eaves ; when clay broke in the thunder of a 
six-pounder, and the sun came up to the clangor 
of the village bell, and the bare and barkless 
spar they had raised and planted the night be- 
fore, budded like Aaron's rod, and blossomed 
out with the broad field of stars. 

On comes the drum-major, now with "eyes to 
the front all," and now facing the music Avith 
backward step, his arms swaying up and down, 
the horizontal baton grasped firmly in his hands, 
as if he were working the band with a brake, 
and playing streams of martial melody on man- 
kind. Then the snarl of the snare - drums, all 
careened for punishment like refractory boys of 
the old-fashioned stripe, and the growl of the big 
bass brother at their heels, and the fifes warbling 
up and down in the grumble and roar, possessed 
and summoned up my soul — shall I say it and 
give thanks?- — possess and summon up my soul 
to-day. Then came the flag with an eagle on it, 
and two spontoons beside it to pierce that eagle's 
enemies. Then the patriots of the Revolution, 
who remembered when there was no such thing 
as a Fourth of July with a big F; old smoky 
fellows, two or three, with eagles in their eyes — 
old fellows gnarled like the hemlock, but honored 
like the pine, that had smelted powder at Ben- 
nington; and the orator of the day with an eagle 



182 BAGGAGE. 

in his eye ; and the clergyman who had prayed 
a short prayer and fired a long gun at Yorktown 
or somewhere, with an eagle in his eye. 

Then, to the tune of " Bonaparte crossing the 
Rhine," out stepped the white-legged infantry, 
with breasts and backs of blue, each with an 
eagle sewed upon a bright tin plate, all gar- 
nished round with stars and fastened to his hat, 
and that eagle's royal tail feathering out at the 
top the while, to plume him up like Henry of 
Navarre. 

Then came the riflemen in green frock-coats 
and caps befringed, and horns slung at their 
sides, that once were tossed defiant upon a shaggy 
head that might have answered back the bulls 
of Bashan, and had, for anything you know, an 
eagle in its eye ; and on they went, their rifles 
lightly borne to the order of "Trail— — arms!" 
Ah, it was " the hunters of Kentucky " all over 
again. It was the whole Boone family in the 
flesh. It was an apparition of the dark and 
bloody ground. 

Then, with the warble of bugle and much 
clatter, clang and ring of hoofs and spurs and 
scabbards, the old-fashioned troopers rode by with 
eagles in their eyes ; their holsters, small pack- 
ages of thunder and lightning, at the saddle-bow; 
their shiny cylinders of portmanteaus snugly 
strapped behind ; the terrible frown of a bear- 



MY STARRY DAYS. 183 

skin cap lowering on every brow, its jaunty 
feather, tipped with emblematic blood, springing 
out of the fur like tne blossom o± a magnified 
and glorified bull-thistle — and the flare of the 
red-coats set the scene and your heart on fire 
together ! 

Then came the citizens by twos, as the pairs 
went into the ark, and the girls in white frocks 
with sashes and ribbons of blue, as if they had 
just torn out of heaven and brought away with 
them some fragments of azure for token ; but 
there are no eagles any more in the line- — only 
white doves and angels unfallen. Then the mouth 
of the orator was opened — a coop of rhetorical 
eagles, and they flew abroad and swooped down 
upon our feelings and bore them aloft triumphant, 
and perched upon our souls and made eyries in 
our lofty hearts, and we were better and braver 
for it all. Then came the dinner in a "bower" 
— have you quite forgotten the dining-hall of green 
branches? — with such dainty roasters as the 
Gentle Elia would have wept over and then de- 
voured, and toasts that foamed over the tops of 
the goblets and set themselves aright in the 
cups ; and a flight of hurrahs went up with the 
eagles — and the day was done. 

Do you think I would exchange that dear 
absurd old day for "the pomp and circumstance" 
of any later pageant ? A Fourth-of-Julyism has 



J 



184 BAGGAGE. 

somehow become an object of contempt. People 
tell us, but not always in good English, that 
speeches are idle, because they have heard that 
silence is golden, and, like the green spectacles 
of Moses and the talk of the rascal in the Vicar 
of Wakefield, should be labeled "fudge." As if 
it was not an idea clothed in a snug jacket of 
words, and not a deed at all, that first gave 
the Fourth of July a meaning and a gift to 
mankind ! As if the elder Adams ' recipe to 
pickle the day— 1 write with no irreverence — 
to pickle the day in " villainous saltpetre " would 
not be sure to keep it ! As if the roar of ar- 
tillery — thank God for the blank cartridges of 
Independence ! — were anything more than that 
eloquent whisper uttered under the shadow of 
King's Mountain in the old North State, "these, 
colonies are, and of right ought to be, free," 
translated into the dialect of gunpowder ! Shine 
on, starry day of my boyhood ! Thy thunders, 
thy eagles, and thy memories, be they blessed 
forever ! 

Thanksgiving. 

I AM sorry for the man — especially the woman 
— who has nowhere a day or two touched with 
some tender grace ; a day of which, travel fast 
and far as he may, he is never out of sight ; 
that warms his heart for him, makes him gent- 



MY STARRY DAYS. 185 

ler, purer, younger than before, more like a 
woman and just as much of a man. Everywhere 
else in Christendom the year has three hundred 
and sixty-five clays, but in America it has a day 
of grace, and as much a New England product 
as Joel Barlow or Indian corn : for we count 
three hundred and sixty-five days and Thanks- 
giving. 

As everybody knows, the day was the most 
blessed of blunders. Those single-minded, grand 
old fellows — old when they were young — that 
drifted across the sea in the cup of a Flower 
like a parcel of bees, bringing, some of them, 
their stings with them, and from whose rude 
beginnings this broad continent now hums like 
a hive in June, had garnered their corn, and 
tugged up their back-logs, and kicked the light 
snow of "squaw winter" from their Spanish- 
leather boots, and hung up their tall hats on the 
pegs behind the door, and picked their flints for 
such game as red Indian and black bear, and 
spread open their Bibles, and made ready for a 
sojourn before the fire ; then came one of the 
American savages they never shot at — to- wit : 
Indian Summer. 



For past the yellow regiments of corn 
There came an Indian maiden, autumn-born ; 
And June returned and held her by the hand, 
And led Time's smiling Ruth through all the land. 
24 



186 BAGGAGE. 

So they made ready for a second planting right 
away, and declared it a goodly land, where a 
very thin slice of autumn was sandwiched be- 
tween two summers, and decreed a Thanksgiving, 
and called the neighbors together, and lifted up 
their voices and sang some such quaint song as — 

" Ye monsters of the bubbling deep, 
Your Maker's praises spout ; 
Up from your sands, ye codlings, peep, 
And wag your tails about ! " 

and clasped each other's hands, and feasted 
abundantly, and took u a cup of kindness," and 
grew so warm with what they had and what 
they ivould have, that when Euroclydon and all 
the rest of them did come, and that right early, 
their gratitude never froze, but wintered it 
through ; and so Thanksgiving remains even until 
now. 

Dear Starry Day, when three generations met 
together and — not to betray confidences — ''right- 
eousness and peace kissed each other." What 
friendships were brightened in thy fire-light ! 
what wrongs were roasted under thy fore-stick ! 
Thy turnovers are imperishable as the Plei- 
ades. Thy chickens of the nankeen legs tucked 
up in a coverlet of crust, and, brooded in the 
bake-kettle by its great coal-laden cover, how 
comfortable they were ! Out of the glowing 



MY STARRY DAYS. 187 

cavern of the brick oven, squatted in the wall 
beside the fireplace like an exaggerated cat, what 
gusts of fragrance from thy turkeys, breasted like 
dead knights in armor, " whose souls are with 
the saints, we trust ;" what whiffs of Indian 
pudding ! what blended breezes of abundance ! 
Thy doughnuts of orthodox twist, and tinted like 
cedar wood, yet heap the bright tin pans of 
memory. Thy mighty V's of mince pies yet slant 
to the angle of perfect content, and fit and fill 
the mouth of recollection. 

Surely heart and stomach are next-door neigh- 
bors, for now, Thanksgiving, thy dear old faces 
smile a welcome home ; thy dear old faces, every 
one unchanged, undimmed, unsent away. Rouse 
the fire to a hearty roar of greeting ! Wheel 
out the great table laden like the palm of Prov- 
idence. Bring forth the empty chairs. Let us 
" ask a blessing ! " Let us give thanks ! 

Christmas. 

Methuselah died pretty well along in his 
years of discretion, but a world at his age would 
hardly have been out of its swaddling bands. 
There is a star, less than two thousand years old, 
that lights a day for us, the fairest, youngest 
of all the spangled multitude — the very Benja- 
min of Heaven. The telescope of the astronomer 



/ 



188 BAGGAGE. 

never summoned it. Numbered in the celestial 
census, I am sure it will not be there when the 
constellations are rolled together as a scroll. It 
is immortal as the candle of the Lord. It is the 
Star in the East that lights up Christmas for 
us with a wonderful radiance. 

If there is ever a time in all the year when 
the two worlds touch, I think it is Christmas 
Eve. What less than a first small act of faith 
is that hanging a million of empty stockings by 
a million pins at night, and then tumbling the 
trundle-beds of Christendom with the delightful 
and sleepless expectancy that they will find them 
all rilled in the morning ? Let a man play Saturn 
and eat his childxen and be done with it ; but 
let him not set a dog on their angels — a cur 
of a fact, that should have been born with its 
nose in a muzzle, upon Santa Claus or Kriss 
Kringle, and worry him out of the children's 
sweet kingdom of dreams. 

Whoever wants to make his children older than 
any wholesome grandfather ought to be, has only 
to strip the world stark naked before their faces; 
bare all its exquisite mystery that keeps one pair 
of burnished interrogation-points for ever dancing 
in another pair of eyes, resolve the thrones and 
paradises and angels they see in the plighted 
clouds, into a heavy and delusive fog ; and, by- 
and-by, for the quicksilverish atoms of humanity 



MY STARRY DAYS. 180 

that hunt out every grain of true gold in the 
rubbish of life, full of marvel and fancy and 
poetry as any old ballad, he will have a row of 
little desiccated, unspeculative, philosophical don- 
keys all draped in wet blankets. 

I visited, not long ago, the house where some- 
thing happened to me when I narrowly escaped 
being too young to be counted, but you can never 
guess what was the first thing I looked for. It 
was not, as you might think, the threshold worn 
smooth and beautiful by the touch of feet that 
have played truant forever, nor the dear home- 
room with its altar-place for beech and maple 
offerings, nor yet the nook of darkness under the 
stairs where goblins and ogres held sweet coun- 
sel together by night. 

It was only the old chimney-top my eyes first 
sought, to whose rugged edges and sooty mouth- 
piece a thousand boatswain winds had put their 
lips and whistled up the storms for eighty years. 
It was the homeliest structure that ever seemed 
beautiful to anybody. Shall I tell you why ? 
Down that chimney the angel descended with 
my first Christmas gift. What was the ladder 
of Jacob to me then, has turned, at last, into a 
rude unlettered monument to the dead past. 

They whom I surprised with my " Merry 
Christmas," in the gray of the morning, have 
gone away for the everlasting holidays. The 



190 BAGGAGE. 

children with whom I joined hands and hearts 
are — ivhere are they? There are fences in the 
graveyard tipped with funeral urns of black. 
There are broken slabs of marble bearing names 
that have fallen out of human speech. There 
are hard, grim men. There are meek and sad- 
eyed women, full of care. Has the sparkle of 
life utterly vanished from the cup ? Can the 
sleigh-bells' chime and the glittering nights and 
the laugh of young girls and the measure of old 
songs charm no more? 

Oh, Comrades ! oh, Sweethearts ! Let me give 
you a touch of the time when happiness was the 
very cheapest thing in the round world: let me 
give you " a merry Christmas " out of the lone- 
liness ! 

But children are not out of fashion, and so 
the world is not bankrupt. Herod — he deserves 
the compliment and he shall have it — Herod 
was nothing less than devilish shrewd when he 
fancied he could quench Christmas in the blood 
of the children ; for if ever two things were 
made for each other, a merry child and a merry 
Christinas are the two. 

What the poor creatures did that were born 
and grown before the clock of the Christian era 
struck "one" nobody can tell. We all need such 
days — the young that they may never grow old; 



M Y S TA RR Y DA J r S. 191 

the old that they may always be young. I think 
it might be written among the beatitudes : 

" Blessed are they whose sons are all boj T s and 
whose daughters are all girls." 

It was when Caesar Augustus decreed that "all 
the world" should be enrolled — an edict never 
to be repeated on the planet until the coming 
of the Seventh Angel — and everybody was on 
the move to report in his native city — for in 
that country the leap from a howling wilderness 
to a city was as easy as a panther's — if it 
didn't howl it had a mayor! 

Among those who came to Bethlehem on this 
errand were a man and his wife from Nazareth, 
and, as the tavern was crowded, they went to 
the barn, and there the Chief of Children was 
born, and cradled in a manger. 

And that was the first Christmas. 

There were Angels without, who brought their 
glory with them, and they stood and sang, 
" Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace to the men of good will ! " 

And that was the first Christmas Carol. 

A few Shepherds watching their flocks not far 
away came just as they were, in their every-day 
clothes, and wondered and glorified, and were 
glad. 

And that was the first Christmas Party. 



192 BAGGAGE. 

Some travelers from the East — and wise, as 
you may know, by the cardinal point — were 
seeking the Christmas, but no one could tell 
them anything, till a Star journeyed on before, 
and halted, like Gibeon's sun, over where the 
young child was — ah, always now as then, find 
Christmas and a child is not far off — and they 
unfolded their treasures, and gave him gold and 
frankincense and myrrh. 

And that was the first Christmas Gift. 

The shepherds are dead, the "wise men" are 
East, and the angels in Heaven. But the star 
and the child and the manger are eveiy where. 
Come, let us have a frolic together ! Even the 
turkey has a merry-thought in its breast ; and 
are we not better than a flock of turkeys ? Let 
us advertise for a good digestion and a downy 
pillow, and a pleasant dream and a Merry Christ- 
mas. Let us do it in these words : 

Wanted — A debtor to be forgiven. 
Wanted — A wrong to be forgotten. 
Wanted — A heart to be lightened. 
Wanted — A home to be brightened. 

Wherever the Star halts, there shall be no lack 
of carols. Bid the singers begin ! And the same 
old manger chorus swells sweetly again — "On 
earth peace to the men of good will ! " Shine 
on, gentle Star ! Merry Christmas, Good Night ! 



"No. 104,163." 198, 



CHAPTER II. 



"No. 104,163." 

" The great Mercantile Library Enterprise of 
San Francisco," so I read in my evening paper, 
" will positively distribute its prizes on the 31st 
of October. Tickets, five dollars in gold." 

And then I turned to the glittering roll of 
fortunes. There they were, heaped up in an 
auriferous pyramid curiously balanced on its aj>ex. 
At the bottom lay a poor little " $100 in gold," 
not worth minding, and up swelled the shining 
structure, - $1,000 — $5,000 — $10,000 — $25,000 — 
$50,000 — until away at the top blazed clear 
across the column, 

"$100,000 in Gold!" 

All gold from the land of Gold, the unearthed 

Ophir of the Solomonic time. Everything had a 

bilious tint. It was as if I was seeing creation 

through an Oriental topaz. I felt for my ears, 

lest I had somehow swapped with Midas for his 
25 



1U4 BAGGAGE 

transmuting touch. No railway conductor was 
ever more clamorous for tickets than my heart 
was. Gold was 113 that day, so I counted out 
$5.65, turned it into a Post-office order, and 
transmitted it to the nearest agent. The ticket 
came, a strip of paper tawny as the Tiber, a 
faint reflection of " great heaps of gold," as 
Clarence said, but not to drown for, as Clarence 
did. It was covered with "a strange device" — 
the ticket was — like the handkerchief the Alpine 
traveler carried in his hand, who talked Latin 
and cried "Excelsior!" 

To think what splendid possibilities might lurk 
in that oblong piece of paper was enough to 
take one's breath away ! I said not a word to 
Lucy — that's my wife — but folded it tenderly, 
as if it were a napkin with ten talents in it, 
and laid it away with a gold half dollar and a 
broken ring and a curl of hair and a stray pearl 
that had tumbled out of an old brooch, and a 
bit of ribbon and a faint suspicion of dead and 
gone fragrance — "all and singular" the con- 
tents of a little box that, forty years ago, would 
have been a " till " in the upper right-hand cor- 
ner of a chest of drawers, and as nearly like an 
old-fashioned heart as two things can be that 
are made to hold the same sort of little trinkets 
of love and memory that everybody else foregoes 
and forgets. 



"No. 104,163." 195 

The ticket lay there a month and I never said 
a word, but I began to get my money back 
right away. I tripped up the rounds of the 
golden ladder every day, and, strange to tell, I 
was totally unable to stop going up until I 
reached the top and stood with both feet perched 
upon " 8100,000 in gold." I tried to steady my- 
self a little and be persuaded that $25,000 would 
be comfortable. I did my best to cultivate a 
sentiment of respect for 150,000, but the paltry 
sum sank below the horizon, and like the Spaniard 
overwhelmed at sight of the sea, who went down 
upon his knees 011 Gilboa or somewhere, I 
saw nothing but the golden ocean of $100,000. 
And why not ? Was not the one quite as easy 
to get as the other ? To be sure, in the glow 
of my story the capital prize that stood upon 
its head as a pyramid, has been fashioned into a 
ladder like Jacob's, with the angels of Imagin- 
ation and Fancy going up and down thereon, 
and at last all melted into a sea, has inundated 
the whole landscape ; but I tell you a man with 
a hundred thousand dollars may defy rhetoric 
and mixed metaphors with impunity. 

I thought I would make my will, and " give 
and bequeath to my well-beloved wife Lucy " 
fifty thousand dollars. When I had counted this 
out by itself, the heap of gold glittered so that 
it dazzled me out of my discretion, and I asked 



196 BAGGAGE. 

Lucy, in a quiet way, whether if I had $100,000 
in gold and should will her fifty thousand free 
and clear, it would be enough. She laughed and 
said she thought it would be liberal ! I then 
told her what I had done. Now, Lucy is pretty 
square-cornered mentally, but she comes of a 
stock on the mother's side somewhat given to 
dreaming. That mother of hers — she is seventy- 
six if she is a day — will see as much beauty in 
the sky and breathe the fragrance of the apple- 
^ blossoms with as fresh a pleasure as if the world 
were only sixteen years old, and world and woman 
were born twins. She will sit down any time 
upon a damp bank of crimson and gold cloud 
that flanks the sunset, and never think of taking 
cold more than she did forty years ago. She is 
always seeing faces in the fire, and laying plans 
that will never be hatched, and altogether has a 
thousand luxuries that the tax-gatherer can not 
possibly get into his schedule. Lucy betrays her 
lineage. "When I give her a "ten" sometimes, 
she will fold her arms, swing slowly to and fro 
in the rocking-chair, and pay it all out over and 
over, and get her money's worth in ever so many 
things useful and beautiful, and the green-backed 
decimal will be snugly lying all the while in 
that same box of momentous trifles. I think ten 
dollars go as far with Lucy as twenty-five do 



"No. 104,163." 197 

with most people, and by the same sign make 
her two and a half times as happy. 

"Port" — that is the name of my boy — saw 
not a glimmer of gold for days and days after 
Lucy had her saffronian vision. He toiled on like 
Bunyan's fellow with the muck-rake at his call- 
ing, nor saw the angel, golden even as a sun- 
flower, that floated overhead. It seemed a pity 
to wrong him out of his inheritance, and so I 
told him. I said, " Port, we are a rich family," 
and showed him the strip of paper. He ticked 
off the figures slowly, like a clock just running 
down, 1-0-4-1-6-3, and said — nothing. I thought 
he lacked gratitude, and so I made a plunge 
into the dark ages for something to punish him 
with, and came up with the brand-new fact that 
ingratitude is a crime so base the ancients never 
thought it worth while to make a law against 
it, as nobody, probably, would ever be guilty of 
it. "Port" went out, and I at once set about 
erasing the last cypher of the bequest I had 
made the boy, so that what had read 810,000 
became $1,000, and I devised all the rest for the 
cultivation of gratitude in the human family. 

Meanwhile the days grew shorter and shorter, 
like the strings of David's harp, and October 
was about done, and the drawing was at hand. 
But what mattered it all ? We had entered into 



1/ 



198 BAGGAGE. 

possession already. We had invested one hundred 
thousand of the prize in the best of securities, 
and we were receiving eight thousand dollars a 
year, for you see it was ^100,000 in gold, to- 
wit : $113,000 in greenbacks. We owed no man 
anything. We had traveled all over the broad 
domain of Columbus' magnificent " find." We 
had given two thousand dollars a year to objects 
of benevolence. We had bought exquisite works 
of art, and sent a dozen poor painters of good 
pictures abroad. We had imported rare old Eng- 
lish books and strewn them upon our tables and 
given them to our neighbors. We presented an 
illustrated copy of "Paradise Lost" to our wood- 
sawyer one day, a copy reinforced like his 
breeches, with leather, and he was very grateful, 
and sat down upon it when he ate his bread 
and cheese and said it was " good," and we 
were gratified. - We purchased a sober horse and 
a modest carriage, and propped up the line fence 
and shingled the kitchen. In a word, the gaunt 
wolf I had been trying for years to keep away 
from the door, had been brained at last with a 
golden club, and his skin lay upon the carriage 
floor for a foot-robe. 

There was a legion or people we wanted to 
help — a great many of them when we first be- 
gan, and I told Lucy to get a quire of paper 
and make a catalogue, but somehow or other they 



"No. 104,163." 199 

got fewer as we thought about it, until she num- 
bered every one upon her fingers that seemed to 
have much hold upon our affections. Those I 
pensioned off in the most liberal manner, and 
had quite a warm and genial feeling about my 
heart, as if I had really been beneficent and done 
something, when I had only been benevolent and 
wished something. We had two or three wealthy 
neighbors who had gathered richness as damp 
logs gather moss, and that was about all there 
was of it — aggregating golden egg after golden 
egg^ flattening themselves out like an incubating 
goose ambitious to cover the whole nest, and 
calling the proceeding " enterprise." I would set 
these mossy fellows an example that should re- 
buke them to the tips of their ears. And so I 
gave twenty thousand dollars for a public library 
to be free to all residents of the town forever. 
We had made Christmas " merry " and New Year 
" happy" for many a heart that would else have 
had neither one nor the other. 

I am glad now to be able to state that there 
was only one man whom I had the least desire 
to humble when I became an hundred thousand 
strong, and he was an insurance agent — a retired 
doctor, who, growing weary of saving lives with 
pills, had taken to insuring lives with policies. 
He was always tormenting me " to insure." He 
looked me over like an undertaker with a mea- 



200 BAGGAGE. 

sure in his eye. He kept me constantly reminded 
of the fact of death, as if it were inevitable. I 
hardly ever saw him that I did not fancy him 
rushing around to my widow the next day after 
I had won the wager, paying her the amount of 
insurance, and thence away to the printing office 
with a card nickering in his hand, inscribed with 
words and figures following, to-wit : 

Agent of the So-and-So Insurance Co. : 

I thank you for the prompt payment of the sum of $10,000, 
for which amount you had insured my late husband's life. 

Gratefully, Lucy. 

Late husband indeed ! The pulses of a pound 
of cold putty are lively compared with my cir- 
culation at the idea of that sort of "late" — 
oo late ever to be again "on time." Well, all 
I want of that doctor is that he shall solicit me 
once more, when I will say, " Insure ? Do I 
look like a man who needs help for his perish- 
ing family? Examine my will — Lucy, $50,000! 
fc Port,' $20,000 ! Accept an invitation to my 
Free Library. Be silent and be happy. Good 
morning," and with this nightcap for his impor- 
tunity, I would pass graciously on like a great 
harvest-moon when it gives the last touch to the 
ripening regiments of corn. 

And the thirty-first of October came at last, 
and the supreme hour for the turn of the wheel 



"No. 104,163." 201 

away there in the city of the Golden Gate, but 
what should I care ? The capital prize had all 
been won, and invested, and given away and ex- 
pended. I had rehearsed the fortune and it had 
left no corroding care — that word "corroding," 
heart-gnawing it ought to mean; think of a lively 
rodent, say a squirrel, in a beating heart! — had 
kindled no passion, scattered no Greek fire of 
pride or envy anywhere. What more need I de- 
sire, and yet I could hardly help wondering if 
they knew I had purchased the ticket 104,163 ; 
whether when — not if, for there is never an "if" 
in the land of dreams and of Spain — when the 
capital prize should be declared off to me out of 
the great wheel, they would not telegraph me at 
once from San Francisco, for I certainly would pay 
the expense without a murmur. I went to the 
door once or twice to see if the telegraph mes- 
senger might not be coming, and I at once gave 
him one hundred dollars in gold. But night dis- 
tanced the telegram and reached 'me first. . Pos- 
sibly, though, the agent in Chicago may' write 
me by the evening mail, and I gave one hun- 
dred dollars in gold to the man that licked the 
envelope, and one hundred dollars in gold to the 
man who delivered the letter. But the mail came 
and the letter did not. I was sorry for the loss 
the clerk in the post-office had suffered, and 
made up my mind to make him librarian of my 

26 



y 



202 BAGGAGE. 

Free Library at a salary of a thousand dollars 
a year. 

Along in the evening Lucy and I had a little 
discussion as to whether we should not take the 
prize in gold, say double eagles, and put them 
all to roost on the dining table, and call in a 
few friends to see the golden aviary with its 
blessed birds of Paradise, and borrow the neigh- 
bor's steelyards, as somebody did in the touching- 
story of the " Forty Thieves," or some other 
Arabian Night's entertainment, and weigh the 
hundred thousand avoirdupois, and then send it 
back to Chicago and have the dead metal return 
all in full leaf, green as Valambrosa, say an hun- 
dred 1,000-dollar bills, or a thousand 100-clollar 
bills, Lucy and I could hardly tell which. 

The first of November dawned as brightly as 
November ever dawns, and with it came the 
tidings that my " $100,000 in gold" had some- 
how, by mistake no doubt, been drawn by some- 
body else, and that ticket 104,163 was worth — 
well — about a twist for a cigar - lighter ! My 
imagination slipped down the golden ladder that, 
like the Patriarch's, had an angel at the top and 
a pillow of stone at the bottom — slipped down 
from its high estate and made a Rachel of itself, 
" and would not be comforted." I left the par- 
lor, where I had been sitting for the last month 
because I thought I could afford to, and went 



"No. 104,163." 203 

av ,y disconsolate into the kitchen, but "Willie," 
the mocking bird, was singing a pleasant song. 
I returned to the parlor and Lucy, the heiress to 
the half of my fortune, was laughing a pleasant 
laugh, and " Port," whom I had forgiven in a 
codicil, and left $20,000, said he did not care a 
" Continental " for the whole business, which, 
considering that Continental currency, toward the 
last of it, was sold low, at about so much a peck, 
" dry measure," may be taken as a pretty for- 
cible expression of his perfect cheerfulness under 
the disaster. 

But was it a disaster ? Had I not had the 
prize, and enjoyed it and shared it and bequeathed 
it ? My fortune had never tempted a thief. It 
had neither put the prayer of the Lord nor of 
Agur out of fashion : " Give us this day our 
daily bread ! " " Give me neither poverty nor 
riches ! " So far as I have heard, " 104,163 " 
was the lucky number after all, and I certainly 
believe nobody ever before received so much for 
so little — $100,000 in imperishable gold for five 
dollars and sixty -five cents, true coin of the 
realm of an imagination and a fancy both warmed 
into a life curiously fresh and new by the touch 
of a hope, never to be realized, of mere mate- 
rial wealth. 

"One blast upon a bugle horn," — if we may 
trust a man who was more conscientious in the 



1204 BAGGAGE. 

telling of fiction than most men are in relating 
the truth, — was "worth a thousand men." Jeri- 
cho came down at the blast of a horn. 

Fame's shall give breath, and all the land 
shall give heed. Gabriel's shall sound, and the 
dead shall be intent. But cornucopia the golden 
is the exalted horn among the nations. They 
always see the glittering millions lavished from 
the broader end that flares and blossoms like a 
tulip, but it is strange they do not oftener dis- 
cern the diminished man coming out at the other 
and the lesser end of the self-same horn. The 
wealth may make a ladder and rig it out with 
rounds commanding loftier planes and broader 
views, but there must be a foot bold enough to 
climb them, and a brain balanced enough to re- 
gard the grander horizons and the growing lights 
undizzied and undazzled, and a heart true enough 
to be touched and softened and kindled by it 
all into the living belief that these words are 
worthy of all acceptation : " Faith, Hope, Charity 
— these three, but the greatest of these is 
Charity." A belief lodged in the head is there, 
/ but a belief lodged in the heart is every where. 
As for Lucy and I, our "castles in Spain" are 
all builded and peopled, the lawns around them 
are Elysian, the sky above them is clear heaven, 
sunshine plays forever around their purple towers. 
Let us make fast the door against the wolf we 



"No. 104,163." 205 

thought we had killed with a bludgeon of gold, 
and betake ourselves again with cheerfulness and 
content to our possessions in Spain — ours for- 
ever and a day by the power of the charm that 
lay hid in the ticket I purchased — and Lucy, 
" Port" and I do earnestly wish that all the 
readers of this chapter from life, if they do not 
draw the Capital Prize, may at least gain that 
next best thing — the treasure wrapped up, like 
a rose in a bud, in Number 104,163. 



206 BAGGAGE. 



CHAPTER III. 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 

,w I FIND the marks of my shortest steps beside 
those of my beloved mother, which were meas- 
ured by my own," says Dumas, and so conjures 
up one of the sweetest images in the world. He 
was revisiting the home of his infancy ; he was 
retracing the little paths around it in which he 
had once walked ; and strange flowers could not 
efface, and rank grass could not conceal, and 
cruel ploughs could not obliterate, his "shortest 
footsteps," and his mother's beside them, meas- 
ured by his own. 

And who needs to be told whose footsteps 
they were that thus kept time with the feeble 
pattering of childhood's little feet ? It was no 
mother beside whom Ascanius walked " with equal 
steps " in Virgil's line, but a strong, stern man, 
who could have borne him and not been bur- 
dened ; folded him in his arms from all danarer 
and not been wearied ; everything, indeed, he 
could have done for him, but just what he needed 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 207 

most — could not sympathize with him — he could 
not be a child again. Ah, a rare art is that, — 
for, indeed, it is an art, to set back the great 
old clock of time and be a boy once more ! Man's 
imagination can easily see the child a man ; but 
how hard it is for it to see the man a child ; 
and he who had learned to glide back into that 
rosy time when he did * not know that thorns 
were under the roses, or that clouds would ever 
return after the rain ; when he thought a tear 
could stain a cheek no more than a drop of 
rain a flower ; when he fancied that life had no 
disguise, and hope no blight at all — has come 
as near as anybody can to discovering the North- 
west passage to Paradise. 

And it is, perhaps, for this reason that it is so 
much easier for a mother to enter the kingdom 
of Heaven than it is for the rest of the world. 
She fancies she is leading the children, when, 
after all, the children are leading her, and they 
keep her, indeed, where the river is narrowest, 
and the air is clearest ; and the beckoning of the 
radiant band is so plainly seen from the other 
side, that it is no wonder she so often lets go her 
clasp upon the little finger she is holding, and 
goes over to the neighbor's, and the children fol- 
low like lambs to the fold ; for we think it ought 
somewhere to be written: "Where the mother 
is, there will the children be also." 



208 BAGGAGE. 

But it was not of the mother, but of the clear 
old - fashioned grandmother, whose thread of love 
spun " by hand " on life's little wheel, and longer 
and stronger than they make it now, was wound 
around and about the children she saw playing 
in the children's arms, in a true love-knot that 
nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; 
for do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, 
when summer days are over and autumn winds 
are blowing, as they come bleating from the yel- 
low fields, by the crimson thread we wound about 
their necks in April or May, and so undo the 
gate and let the wanderers in ? 

Blessed be the children who have an old-fash- 
ioned grandmother. As they hope for length of 
days let them love and honor her, for we can 
tell them they will never find another. 

There is a large old kitchen somewhere in the 
past, and an old-fashioned fireplace therein, with 
its smooth old jambs of stone — smooth with 
many knives that have been sharpened there — 
smooth with many little fingers that have clung 
there. There are andirons, too — the old andirons, 
with rings in the top, whereon many temples of 
flame have been builded, with spires and turrets 
of crimson. There is a broad, worn hearth, worn 
by feet that have been torn and bleeding by 
the way, or been made " beautiful," and walked 
upon floors of tesselated gold. There are tongs 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 209 

in the corner, wherewith we grasped a coal, and 
"blowing for a little life," lighted our first can- 
dle ; there is a shovel, wherewith were drawn 
forth the glowing embers in which we saw our 
first fancies and dreamed our first dreams — the 
shovel with which we ^tirred the sleepy logs till 
the sparks rushed up the chimney as if a forge 
were in blast below, and wished we had so many 
lambs, so many marbles, or so many somethings 
that we coveted ; and so it was we wished our 
first wishes. 

There is a chair — a low, rush-bottom chair; 
there is a little wheel in the corner, a big wheel 
in the garret, a loom in the chamber. There 
are chests full of linen and yarn, and quilts of 
rare pattern, and samples in frames. 

And everywhere and always the dear eld wrink- 
led face of her whose firm, elastic step mocks 
the feeble saunter of her children's children — 
the old-fashioned grandmother of twenty years 
ago. She, the very Providence of the old home- 
stead — she who loved us all, and said she wished 
there were more of us to love, and took all the 
school in the Hollow for grand-children besides. 
A very expansive heart was hers, beneath that 
woolen gown, or that more stately bombazine, or 
that sole heir-loom of silken texture. 

We can see her to-day, those mild blue eyes, 
with more of beauty in them than time could 

27 : 



210 BAGGAGE. 

touch or death do more than hide— those eyes 
that held both smiles and tears within the faint- 
est call of every one of us, and soft reproof, that 
seemed not passion but regret. A white tress 
has escaped from beneath her snowy cap ; she 
has just restored a wandering lamb to its mother ; 
she lengthened the tether of a vine that was 
straying over a window, as she came in, and 
plucked a four-leaved clover for Ellen. She sits 
down by the little wheel — a tress is running 
through her fingers from the distaff's disheveled 
head, when a small voice cries "Grandma!" 
from the old red cradle, and " Grandma ! ; ' 
Tommy shouts from the top of the stairs. Gently 
she lets go the thread, for her patience is almost 
as beautiful as her charity, and she touches the 
little bark in a moment, till the young voyager 
is in a dream again, and then directs Tommy's 
unavailing attempts to harness the cat. The tick 
of the clock runs faint and low, and she opens 
the mysterious door and proceeds to wind it up. 
We are all on tip - toe, and we beg in a breath 
to be lifted up one by one, and look in the 
hundredth time upon the tin cases of the weights, 
and the poor lonely pendulum, which goes to 
and fro by its little dim window, and never 
comes out in the world, and our petitions are 
all granted, and we are lifted up, and we all 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 211 

touch with a finger the wonderful weights, and 
the music of the little wheel is resumed. 

Was Mary to he married, or Jane to he wrapped 
in a shroud ? So meekly did she fold the white 
hands of the one upon her still hosom, that there 
seemed to be a prayer in them there ; and so 
sweetly did she wreathe the white rose in the 
hair of the other, that one would not have won- 
dered had more roses budded for company. 

How she stood between us and apprehended 
harm ; how the rudest of us softened beneath 
the gentle pressure of her faded and tremulous 
hand ! From her capacious pocket that hand 
was ever withdrawn closed, only to be opened 
in our own, with the nuts she had gathered, the 
cherries she had plucked, the little egg she had 
found, the "turn-over" she had baked, the trinket 
she had purchased for us as the product of her 
spinning, the blessing she had stored for us — 
the offspring of her heart. 

What treasures of story fell from those old 
lips ; of good fairies and evil, of the old times 
when she was a girl ; and we wondered if ever 

— but then she couldn't be handsomer or dearer 

— but that she ever was "little." And then, 
when we begged her to sing ! " Sing us one of 
the old songs you used to sing mother, grandma." 

" Children, I can't sing," she always said ; and 



'212 BAGGAGE. 

mother used to lay her knitting softly down, and 
the kitten stopped playing with the yarn upon 
the floor, and the clock ticked lower in the cor- 
ner, and the fire died down to a glow, like an 
old heart that is neither chilled nor dead, and 
grandmother sang. To be sure it would n't do 
for the parlor and the concert-room now-a-days ; 
but then it was the old kitchen and the old- 
fashioned grandmother, and the old ballad, in the 
dear old times, and we can hardly see to write 
for the memory of them, though it is a hand's 
breadth to the sunset. 

Well, she sang. Her voice was feeble and 
wavering, like a fountain just ready to fail, but 
then how sweet-toned it was ; and it became 
deeper and stronger, but it could n't grow sweet- 
er. What "joy of grief" it was to sit there 
around the fire, all of us, except Jane, that 
clasped a prayer to her bosom, and her we thought 
we saw, when the hall-door was opened a mo- 
ment by the wind ; but then we were not afraid, 
for was n't it her old smile she wore ? — to sit 
there around the fire, and weep over the woes 
of the " Babes in the Wood," who lay down 
side by side in the great solemn shadows ; and 
how strangely glad we felt when the robin-red- 
breast covered them with leaves, and last of all 
when the angels took them out of the night 
into Day Everlasting. 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 218 

We may think what we will of it now, but 
the song and the story heard around the kitchen 
fire have colored the thoughts and lives of most 
of us ; have given us the germs of whatever 
poetry blesses our hearts ; whatever memory blooms 
in our yesterdays, Attribute whatever we may 
to the school and the school-master, the rays 
which make that little day we call life, radiate 
from the God-swept circle of the hearthstone. 

Then she sings an old lullaby she sang to 
mother — her mother sang to her; but she does 
not sing it through, and falters ere 'tis done. 
She rests her head upon her hands, and it is 
silent in the old kitchen. Something glitters 
down between her fingers and the firelight, and 
it looks like rain in the soft sunshine. The old 
grandmother is thinking when she first heard the 
song, and of the voice that sang it, when a 
light-haired and light-hearted girl she hung around 
that mother's chair, nor saw the shadows of the 
years to come. O ! the days that are no more ! 
What spell can we weave to bring them back 
again ? What words can we unsay, what deeds 
undo, to set back, just this once, the ancient 
clock of time ? 

So all our little hands were forever clinging 
to her garments, and staying her as if from 
dying, for long ago she had done living for her- 
self, and lived alone in us. But the old kitchen 



214 BAGGAGE. 

wants a presence to-day, and the rush-bottomed 
chair is tenantless. 

How she used to welcome us when we were 
grown, and came back once more to the home- 
stead. 

We thought we were men and women, but we 
were children there. The old-fashioned grand- 
mother was blind in the eyes, but she saw with 
her heart, as she always did. We threw our 
long shadows through the open door, and she felt 
them as they fell over her form, and she looked 
dimly up and saw tall shapes in the door-way, 
and she says, " Edward I know, and Lucy's voice 
I can hear, but whose is that other ? It must 
be Jane's," for she had almost forgotten the 
folded hands. "Oh, no, not Jane, for she — let 
me see — she is waiting for me, isn't she?" and 
the old grandmother wandered and wept. 

u It is another daughter, grandmother, that 
Edward has brought," says some one, " for your 
blessing." 

" Has she blue eyes, my son ? Put her hand 
in mine, for she is my latest born, the child of 
my old age. Shall I sing you a song, children?" 
Her hand is in her pocket as of old ; she is 
idly fumbling for a toy, a welcome gift to the 
children that have come again. 

" Come, children, sit around the fire. Shall I 
sing you a song, or tell you a story ? Stir the 



OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER. 215 

fire, for it is cold ; the nights are growing 
colder." 

The clock in the corner struck nine, the bed- 
time of those old days. The song of life was 
indeed sung, the story told, it was bed-time at 
last. Good night to thee, grandmother! The 
old-fashioned grandmother was no more, and we 
miss her forever. But we will set up a tablet 
in the midst of the memory, in the midst of the 
heart, and write on it only this : 

SACRED TO THE MEMORY 

OF THE 

OLD-FASHIONED GRANDMOTHER. 

GOD BLESS HER FOR EVER. 



^iG B A GGA GE. 



CHAPTER IV, 



OUT-DOOR PREACHING, 

The miracle of Spring is beginning. 

Leafless, indeed, stand the great woods, and 
shivering in the cold North wind. The joints of 
rheumatic oaks creak dismally, and there is a 
moan in the maples. The skeleton orchards are 
gray and brown upon the Southern slopes, but 
the sun is shining and the clock of Time ticks 
in the heart of May. A January fire rolls and 
roars up the chimney's capacious throat ; the 
water -pail is nightly glazed with ice, but the 
birds are abroad and their songs are in all the 
air. Not a wisp of hay remains in the wide, 
deep bay of the barn, and the cows decline " to 
give down," and the lambs are going where the 
good lambs go, though the lilacs are budding 
and the willows have fringed the streams with 
green. 

How full of the dear old music of Summer are 
wood, orchard and field. Even the great empty 
barn, with its ribs of oak, is a-twitter with swal- 



OUT -DOOR PREACHING. 2YI 

lows that dart in and out at the diamond doors 
in the gables, and the mud-walled cottages that 
are built along the rafters. The robins are sing- 
ing the self-same song they sang a thousand 
years ago, and the finches are untarnished and 
golden as ever. Down by the marsh the bobo'- 
links are ringing their little bells, and swinging 
to and fro upon the little bushes that sway in 
the wind. The brown thrushes have built their 
nests in the fence - corners and the heaps of 
brush ; a Baltimore oriole flickered like a flake 
of fire through the garden, this morning, and 
drifted away behind the barn ; we frightened 
up a whip-poor-will yesterday, from among 
the withered leaves, and found a blue -bird's 
nest with a single egg in a hollow stump in 
the pasture. A little gray couple are busy build- 
ing in the cleft of the bar -post, and a small 
Trojan in speckled jacket is about to keep house 
on the loaded end of the well-sweep that goes 
up forty times a day and comes down with a 
bang. Why did n't the little idiot take up his 
quarters in the bucket ! A fortnight ago, John 
hung his jacket upon the fence, and to-day he 
shook out from one of the pockets a nest, and 
two eggs as blue as the sky. 

There is singing everywhere : from the tuft of 
gray grass there comes a small tune of two 
notes and a rest, then two more; from the sec- 

28 



218 BAGGAGE. 

ond rail of the fence a gush of melody ; from 
the roof -ridge, a solo ; from the depths of the 
air, as of angel calling unto angel. The birds 
and the buds make it May, and May it shall be. 

Yesterday was Sunday, as clear and as cool as 
charity, and yesterday I got into good company 
for once in a way, and went to church in the 
woods. The gray temple that God built looked 
dull and empty as I approached, but as I entered, 
the birds were singing an anthem and Nature 
had begun to work a miracle. 

Last winter we floundered to the January ser- 
vice, and the drifts, how huge they were, and 
the white arms of the forest were stretched out 
in silent benediction, stern and cold, like the 
blessing of old Puritans. 

Now, the earth is strewn with withered leaves 
of a gone summer that rustled articulately beneath 
the thoughtful foot, and said, as words can never 
say it : " In the midst of life we are in death," 
and thus the Sermon began. 

And then the birds all around joined in to 
sing, and the wood -dove to mourn with her 
mate, and so this passage of Scripture was read 
out: "The winter is over and gone; the time 
of the singing of birds is come, and the voice 
of the turtle is heard in the land." 

And after that, two sparrows who were blown 
away last autumn by the keen Northeaster, and 



OUT -DOOR. PREACHING. 219 

that nobody thought to see again, sang a simple 
song, the burden whereof was, " Not a sparrow 
falleth to the ground without Him." 

A delicate white flower, that had lifted away 
a counterpane of damp gray leaves, stood up in 
its place at the foot of a great tree, and what 
did we have then, but " Thou fool, that which 
thou sowest is not quickened except it die. Be- 
hold, I show you a mystery ! we shall not all 
sleep, but we shall all be changed." 

And the little stars of pink and white flowers 
that were clustered in a constellation about the 
mossy rock, lifted up their voices and sang, even 
as they did in Time's morning : " There is one 
glory of the sun, and another glory of the 
moon, and another glory of the stars ; for one star 
differeth from another star in glory. So also is 
the resurrection of the dead." And thus the doc- 
trine was demonstrated, and a robin that minute 
began to sing. 

Then there went noiselessly over the dead leaves 
as they lay, and over the preachers, and over 
them that prayed, a small shadow ; and, looking 
up, a white breath of cloud was drifting b}% and 
it said as it went, " Thus passeth human life," 
and the wind breathed a low sigh, and the ser- 
vice went on. 

And all the while the birds were busy as busy 
could be, carrying timbers and tapestry and couches 



220 BAGGAGE. 

of down for the homes they were building, and 
one sang as she wrought, " The better the day," 
and her mate took it up with " The better the 
deed," and the Sabbath unbroken shone on. 

A few bees, brave as their fellows that dared 
the dead lion of old Samson's time, went trum- 
peting along the neighboring fields, a feeble 
charge against the living lion of the North. 
Walking along the grand old aisles upon whose 
floor last summer's dead were lying, let us recall 
the time before the first snow fell, and the re- 
lenting year looked back and smiled, so sad and 
sweet a smile, even as our dead who stand some- 
times upon the holy threshold of a dream ; 
wdien the last breath of those dead leaves went 
heavenward like a prayer, and Indian Summer 
charmed the drowsy earth and golden air. 
But there is no dying now. The graves are 
opened ! Lo, the violet comes ; the lady-slippers 
dance upon the air while wild Sweet Williams 
stand admiring by. 

Grand sermons preached they all, of faith and 
hope and beauty yet to be, and as you turned 
away, there in the field a passage from the Ser- 
mon on the Mount, wrapped in green silk, was 
lying, and what was it but, "Behold the lilies 
of the field, how they grow, they toil not, neither 
do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his gkny 
was not arrayed like one of these." 



OUT -DOOR PREACHING. 221 

So with fragments of sermons and snatches 
of songs strewn along the way, you leave the 
temple of the Lord and bear away with you 
some of the preachers and some of the singers 
and some of the beauties of the great congregation 
in that mighty minster. You dismantle a fallen 
tree of one of Nature's studies, a broad green 
mat of moss, a piece of velvet from the very 
loom that wove the glory of morning, and bear 
it home for Sunday Reading. Perusing it awhile, 
you wonder you could ever have set foot on 
such a dainty piece of work, for there, written 
in God's " fine hand," are maple groves and 
close-fed pastures for some tiny herd ; and little 
pines like filaments of feathers ; and emerald hills 
full-crowned with woods ; and in small valleys, 
like dimples in a baby's cheek, a mimic lily, as 
starlight in a tear ; the least of Alps with sand- 
grain cliffs ; spears for atomies, tipped with a 
drop of red ; trees a full round inch in height, 
touched at the top with something like a sunset ; 
a clover-field broad as a linnet's wing, and tufts 
of shrubs that might hide a hunted gnat from 
some small sportsman in those mimic fields ; a 
landscape done in little ; a picture Nature painted 
on Holidays and Sundays, and so hid death that, 
in some fallen tree, lay like a Titan all abroad. 

And this bright landscape fair as Eden land, 
unrolled upon a dinner plate, was served up for 



'Ill BAGGAGE. 

Love-of-Beauty's feast, where Fancy sat as guest, 
and Hope stood by. How earnest Nature is in 
all she does; how finished, all her work from 
moss to mountain. The tint on girlhood's lip is 
well laid on, indeed, but with no greater care 
than set these rubies in the green fields of Moss- 
land. 

And so that plate of moss " reads like a book." 
A month ago those pines were not ; nay, the 
small mountain where they grow was not em- 
bossed upon the velvet, and here you look upon 
the programme of what Earth shall be — the fin- 
ished miracle of Spring ; what Earth shall be, 
despite complaint and evil prophecy. 

Take Nature at her word, even as the birds 
that trust her, and so toil and sing though snows 
have drifted to the heart of May. Look not 
abroad for token that the end is near. No tel- 
escope shall ever bring to view time's brown 
October. But when the birds forget to build 
their, summer homes and bless the woods, and 
roses lose their flush and fragrance ; when on 
just such another scroll of mossy landscape as 
you are reading now, no promises are made, then 
know that earnest Nature has wearied of her 
work and seeks a Holiday at last. 



THE STORY OF THE BELL. 223 



CHAPTER V. 



THE STORY OF THE BELL. 

The Roman knight who rode, all accoutred 
as he was, into the gulf, and the mouth of the 
hungry Forum closed upon him and was satisfied, 
vanquished, in his own dying, that great Philistine, 
Oblivion, which, sooner or later, will conquer us 
all. 

But there is an old story that always charmed 
me more. In some strange land and time they 
were about to cast a bell for a mighty tcwer ; 
a hollow, starless heaven of iron. It should toll 
for dead monarchs — "the king is dead!" — and 
make glad clamor for the new prince — " long 
live the king ! " It should proclaim so great a 
passion or so grand a pride that either would 
be worship, or, wanting these, forever hold its 
peace. 

Now this bell was not to be digged out of 
the cold mountains ; it was to be made of some- 
thing that had been warmed with a human touch 
or loved with a human love. And so the people 



224 BAGGAGE. 

came like pilgrims to a shrine, and cast their 
offerings into the furnace and went away. There 
were links of chains that bondmen had worn 
bright, and fragments of swords that had broken 
in heroes' hands. There were crosses and rings and 
bracelets of fine gold ; trinkets of silver and toys 
of poor red copper. They even brought things 
that were licked up in an instant by the red 
tongues of flame ; good words they had written 
and flowers they had cherished ; perishable things 
that could never be heard in the rich tone and 
volume of the bell. 

And the fires panted like a strong man when 
he runs a race, and the mingled gifts flowed 
down together and were lost in the sand, and 
the dome of iron was drawn out like leviathan. 

And by -and -by the bell was alone in its 
chamber, and its four windows looked forth to 
the four quarters of heaven. For many a day 
it hung dumb ; the winds came and went, but 
they only set it a sighing ; birds came and went, 
and sang under its eaves, but it was an iron hori- 
zon of dead melody still. All the meaner strifes 
and passions of men rippled on below it. They 
out-groped the ants, and out-wrought the bees, 
and out-watched the Chaldean shepherds, but 
the chamber of the bell was as dumb as the 
pyramids. 

At last there came a time when men ™w 



THE STORY OF THE BELL. 225 

grand for right and truth, and stood shoulder to 
shoulder over all the land, and went down like 
reapers to the harvest of death ; looked into 
the graves of them that slept, and believed there 
was something grander than living ; glanced on 
into the far future and discerned there was some- 
thing bitterer than dying, and so, standing be- 
tween the quick and the dead, they quitted 
themselves like men. 

Then the bell woke in its chamber, and the 
great waves of its music rolled gloriously out 
and broke along the blue walls of the world like 
an anthem ; and every tone in it was familiar 
as a household word to somebody, and he heard 
it and knew it with a solemn joy. Poured into 
that fiery furnace -heart together, the humblest 
gifts were blent in one great wealth, and accents 
feeble as a sparrow's song grew eloquent and 
strong ; and lo, a people's stately soul heaved 
on the tenth wave of a mighty voice ! 

We thank God in this our day for the fur- 
nace and the fire ; for the offerings of gold and 
the trinkets of silver ; for the good deed and 
the true word ; for the great triumph and the 
little song. 

29 



226 BAGGAGE 



CHAPTER VI. 



MY EYE!" 



That sounds like slang, and I have quoted it 
lest somebody should think it original ; but then 
there is really no more slang in it, as I apply 
it, than there is in Agur's prayer — the man 
who wanted what could be spared precisely as 
well as not, and who proposed to make his pan- 
taloons without any pockets. The application 
changes the nature. Thus, I spread mustard 
upon a piece of linen and clap it upon the nape 
of a fellow's neck, and it is a blister. I veneer 
therewith a pink and white slice of Israelitish 
abomination, and protect it with a thin section 
of bread, and it is — oh, blessed transformation ! 
— it is a sandwich! So with the topmost phrase 
of this chapter ; a boy without any brim to his 
hat shouts it in the street, and it is slang ; 
but I take it to christen an essay as full of eyes 
as Juno's Argus, and — presto ! — it becomes a 
Christian name. 

Perhaps there is nothing of which there is so 



"MY EYE/" , 227 

man}' — if we except blades of grass and grains 
of sand — as eyes. From the potato that watches 
you perdu from its native hill, to a peacock's 
tail, about everything is gifted with an eye. 
There 's the eye you put the thread through, and 
the eye which you catch with a hook, my girl, 
when you used to fasten your dress behind ; and 
the eye of Day, and the Daisy, my poet ; and 
the " dry eye," which we have been told once 
or twice that congregations were entirely out of. 
There 's a violet in the garden-border with an 
eye of blue. There 's a fly on the window-pane 
— six legs, and "eyes" enough in its head to 
cany any question with an overwhelming affirm- 
ative. There 's " Black-eyed Susan," in the play, 
that makes you hum " All in the Downs the 
fleet was moored," and snuff salt water, and 
make a fool of yourself. I can recall but three 
things at the moment so poor as not to be 
blessed with at least two eyes : the needle, the 
Cyclops, and the man of one idea ! 

Homer — one of him — says Juno was ox-eyed; 
and though, from all accounts, Juno was rather 
a coarse creature, yet everybody has taken to 
likening his love to somebody's " nigh " ox ; and 
there is something beautiful in the great lamp-like 
eyes of an amiable creature that comes meekly 
under the yoke and never makes complaint. Like 
Darwin's other monkeys, we are all imitative 



228 BAGGAGE. 

animals ; and how many of us would ever have 
thought to look into a bullock's eyes at all if 
the blind native of seven cities had not set the 
example, nobody can tell ; but then it is the 
Greek fashion to praise the women and the oxen 
in the same breath. 

" Ladies and gentlemen, here is one of the 
most veracious animals that swims in the sea. 
He follers ships if so be somebody may be 
thro wed overboard!" 

The speaker was a rough man, with one arm 
and a grizzled lip. The subject of his discourse 
lay in a tank of water, and watched him as he 
talked. The thing was a sea-tiger, and resembled 
an exaggerated seal. Its large, round, dark head 
was lifted out of the water ; but that head was 
illuminated by a pair of the most splendid eyes 
in the world. I can not say there was any trace 
of soul in them, albeit there might be a tender 
memory of the soles of the copper-toed shoes of 
the last little boy he had masticated and swal- 
lowed ; but ah, those eyes ! — they were large 
and gentle and pensive. You would n't have 
been a bit surprised had he burst out with one 
of Moore's melodies about 

" No pearl ever lay under Oman's green water." 

If the keeper was as " veracious " as he declared 
the tiger was, of a truth those eyes were the 



"MY EY£/" 229 

most mendacious couple that ever kept company. 
If there is no surviving relative to object, 1 
should like to call one of them Ananias and the 
other Sapphira. It was a case of love at first 
sight. Such wistful, melting glances as that 
miserable beast turned upon the ladies who 
shook their fans at him, and the little children 
who " made eyes " at him in return, nobody but 
a captivating woman could hope to rival. 

The dingy plaster wall of a smoke-house is 
as utterly blank as your last lottery ticket. Now 
fancy the dirty leather apron of some son of 
Vulcan hung ignobly thereon, and then fancy, 
as you look at it, an impossible eye breaking out 
all at once in an improbable place in that wall 
and close to the apron — an eye small, twinkling, 
uncertain, and you have the expression of an 
elephant's countenance. And yet we boys and 
girls have all been led up to Columbus, Hanni- 
bal, Romeo, and the rest of them, and bidden 
to mark the sagacious glitter of that sinister 
crevice. The word " sagacity" is completely 
ruined for all human uses. It belongs to the 
baggage-smashers of the brute creation ; and when- 
ever you read of some "sagacious" statesman you 
immediately think of an elephant. Without the 
intelligence of a horse or the affection of a dog, 
and with no beauty either of mould or motion, 
the beast's eye tells the story of what Cooper's 
Sachem calls " the hoo* with two tails." 



230 BAGGAGE, 

The remembrance of an eye is the most tena- 
cious of memories. You may forget the fashion 
of face and figure, but if 

" There 's a light in the window for thee," 

the expression of an eye will sometimes be all 
that remains to you of a dead friend. There it 
is that the soul comes the nearest to escaping. 
There it is more nearly undressed and out of 
doors than it can possibly be any where else 
without dying. 

" Was Aaron Burr tall ? " asked one woman 
of another who once saw that recreant " child 
of many prayers " just for one moment at Al- 
bany. 

"I don't know," was the reply; "but such 
a glance as he gave you 1 I have always re- 
membered him as the man with the living eyes." 
Ah, the flash of the soul's artillery has photo- 
graphic powers beyond the art of the artist, and 
it 8 proofs, of all the printing in the world are 
imperishable ! 

Do you remember the pretty pebbles you used 
to gather out of the beds of the brooks — the 
notes of the sweet low tune they ran by ? 
Dripping from the water, they were red rubies 
and green garnets and golden opals and blue 
sapphires — precious stones every one ; but the 
glory and glamour of the brooks once gone, they 



11 MY EYE!" 231 

grew dim and dull and valueless. It is so with 
human eyes. You can not always be sure of their 
color. A pale, light eye may deepen and darken, 
when the soul is stirred behind it, till you de- 
clare it black as midnight ; and a brown eye 
may be fairly bleached blue in the light and fire 
of passion. The elder Booth's eyes were all 
colors in a night ; and Charlotte Cushman's, as 
Meg Merrilies, kindled into a broad white blaze, 
like a pine-knot fire. A nose brought to an 
edge, and a couple of small black eyes, form, 
as astrologers say, " an inauspicious conjunction." 
Such eyes are apt to snap, a dreadful hemlock 
quality, to which a strabismus, so violent that 
the vicious members seem trying to get at each 
other under the bridge of the nose, is a blessing 
and a beauty. Let us not be censorious. Let 
us wish the owners of all such eyes a great 
deal of self-control, or a little of the grace of 
God. 

But whatever you do, I pray you never call 
anybody's eyes " orbs," unless you are re-writing 
Milton'e Paradise Lost. And do n't call them 
"organs." There was a country printer and 
editor whose wristbands would have been always 
in mourning with his hands, if he had worn a 
shirt, and who always had a stale copy of his 
paper sticking out of a side -pocket, and smell- 
ing musty — for he used poor ink and poor ideas 



232 BAGGAGE. 

to match — and he was forever talking of his 
" organ," wherever he was, and quoting from 
his " organ," until people laughed about it, and 
said " there was a complete outfit for some itin- 
erant Italian with musical proclivities. There 
was an w organ,' and there was a monkey, and 
nothing lacking but the man to grind it, and a 
piece of green baize ! " If you wish to know 
about a word, set the children to using it. Fancy 
little Johnny's cry of " Oh, I 've got something 
in my organs ! " or a sound of lamentation in 
Ramah — leastwise in the door-yard — with Jenny's 
wail that her sun-bonnet keeps tumbling over her 
orbs ! When children and grown folks talk alike, 
and the boy speaks as if he were crazy, you may- 
be sure the man talks as if he were a fool. 

I had a friend. He was murdered in Illinois. 
The man that killed him was never so true to 
anybody as was this friend to me and mine. 
He was buried without song or sermon. He has 
gone to a good place, if he has gone <mz/where. 
I am not certain, but I hope so, for there was 
too much genuine nobility about him to perish 
utterly away — to be snuffed out like a candle, 
as if he had never been. His name was — Pedro. 
His eyes, dark in the shadow, russet in the sun, 
talked English all the while. Wronged bv word 
or blow, they pleaded for him with a touching- 
pathos. Caressed, they laughed and sparkled like 



"MY EYE/" 233 

living fountains. Stretched upon the threshold 
in the genial sun, a large human content worth 
praying for shone in his eyes. There was a 
great deal too much meaning in them for a 
creature whose "spirit goeth downward," and 
almost enough for a being with a soul to be 
saved. What gave those eyes their eloquence ? 
Did the mere machinery of a dog's life light 
them up so wonderfully, wistfully, sorrowfully? 
There were love in them, and hope and abiding- 
trust and an honest heart. What lacked he to 
entitle him to two names like a Christian, in- 
stead of one ? He knew plenty of people with 
whom he never could have exchanged qualities 
without getting the worst of the bargain. But 
he did better than to be a contemptible man, 
for he was a noble dog. His eyes look inquir- 
ingly, wistfully, after me through the shadows 
of the years that are past. They are the im- 
mortal part of him. They will last out a human 
memory. Hereaway ! Pedro ! Hereaway ! 

The kernel of the proverb, " Love me, love 
my dog," is that you are getting pretty near a 
man when you have made friends with his dog. 
Now, I hate " black and tans," the tantivying 
creatures, their mouths full of needles, a bark as 
sharp as a razor, and the whole case of instru- 
ments on all sides of you at once ; but I insist 



234 BAGGAGE. 

that I love dogs. " Black and tans " are not 
dogs; they are cutlery. 

And now, to come right home and make a 
personal matter of it, this gossip would never 
have seen the light had I not suffered the tem- 
porary loss of one • eye, and that set me think- 
ing. Our " body servants," the most of them, 
came into the world as Noah's caravan went into 
the ark — in pairs. Two hands, two feet, two 
ears, two eyes ; and they are matched spans, every 
one. The truth is, I never thought much about 
having any eyes at all until one of them went 
under a cloud. None of us do. A man never 
feels his ears, no matter how long they are, while 
they ivorJc well, unless he lays hold of them with 
his hands. With some men, though, their ears 
are their "best hold." So with the eyes. When 
the sight is keen and clear, we just take in day 
and its glories, and the charm of color, and the 
witchery of shadow, we hardly know how. We 
feel them no more than we do the window-panes 
through which come the sunset and the starlight. 
But let something go wrong, and you are brought 
to a lively sense of possession in a twinkling: 
You begin to discover how rich you were with- 
out knowing it, and what an incalculable blessing 
you would lose if only one eye should be extin- 
guished. I breathed air one night, a while ago, 
that eight hundred friendly people had just 



"MY EYE!" 235 

breathed for me ; and I stood with my left 
shoulder to an open window with a chill breeze 
through it, and my left eye fell to weeping for 
the folly of the thing ; and then impalpable crows 
began to build a nest of most palpable sticks, 
and fairly filled the unfortunate eyrie until it 
ceased to be a window, and became a — rookery! 
And the eye was closed until the unseemly birds 
could be persuaded to build elsewhere. 

I think, if you touch a man's eye roughly, 
you come within one of touching his soul ; and 
I came to think at times that the crows were 
foraging in my perceptive faculties for material 
wherewith to put my eye out. 

The first thing done was to pickle the offend- 
ing member in strong brine, as if it were an 
onion ; but the miserable business of corvine 
nidification went on. Had you thrust both those 
hard words into my eye together, it could n't 
have hurt me a bit worse than the crows did. 

Having made pickles, it was thought best to 
put up a sardine or two. Flax seed was ex- 
pressed and impressed in an oleaginous bag, 
whose slippery contents wriggled about on the 
tremulous lid like a packet of angle-worms. But 
the crows liked linseed and kept on. Things 
looked serious, as far as I could see them with 
a solitary eye ; but there was a comfort : if I 
had half as many eyes, I had twice as many 



236 BAGGAGE. 

friends, and they were tender-hearted women. I 
was a sort of Mungo Park, in a small way, only 
I had a wife to look into my eye whenever I 
asked her, which was every few minutes ; and 
I was n't in Africa, and I did n't lie under a 
tree, and my female friends were not negroes, 
and they did n't sing, 

" He has no mother to bring him milk, 
No wife to grind his corn." 

With these exceptions I was precisely like 
Mungo Park. The ladies were solicitous and 
helpful. One suggested bread and milk; it was 
brought and set upon the top of the stove. 
Another, an alum curd ; it was made and set 
under the stove. A third, Thompson's Eye-water ; 
it was brought and thrown into the stove. A 
fourth, Pettit's Eye-salve ; it appeared and was 
set upon the table. 

Sandwiches were pronounced good ; and hand- 
breadths of mustard, tawnier than the river 
Tiber, were spread behind my ears, and a care- 
less crow dropped a stick or two. It was getting 
too warm for them, but I could not see why. 
In fact, I couldn't see much of anything. It 
grew warm ; it waxed hot. The skin rolled up 
like tattered bits of parchment, and the sandwich 
lunch was over. 

It was time to call the Doctor. He came. 



" MY EYE!" 237 

Shrewd, skillful, patient, lie mastered the situa- 
tion. He saw the dishes of sea-water standing 
about, and the bags of linseed, and the plasters 
of mustard, and the alum curds, and the lotions, 
and the unguents, and he fell upon my eye, and 
he opened it as a Baltimore boy opens an oyster. 
He got no help from me ; but he saw the crows. 
Looking about, he took a rapid inventory of 
what there was in the room that had not al- 
ready been put into my eye. He gazed inquir- 
ingly at the bureau and a large rocking-chair. 
The sheet of zinc on which the stove stood ar- 
rested his attention. " You have n't used that, 
have you?" "No," said I; and he whipped 
out a little bottle, said "Zinc" shook it, pried 
open my eye with an earnestness that would 
not be denied, and poured the zinc square into 
it. Did you ever lie on your back in the bottom 
of a shot-tower when they were raining lead ? 
If you never did, you do n't want to. And then 
the Doctor rolled my unfortunate optic about 
like a billiard ball, until the liquid was swashed 
over the whole surface. I thought then, and I 
still think, he meant to burn up the crows' nest, 
possibly the crows. That eye was better ; the 
birds dropped a few more sticks ; but they hung 
about the old place still. 

It was then thought best to give the cellar 
the usual spring cleaning, and feed the pig with 



0A GGA GE. 

tlif product. Rotten apples weie recommended; 
and a Russet, that needed to be sent to the 
cooper's, leaned lazily over to one side on a 
little plate, ready for use. 

A kind lady from Massachusetts, for whose 
interest I shall always be grateful, said that hen 
and chickens were good — hen and chickens 
smothered in cream. That puzzled me. It was 
too late for hens and too early for chickens. 
But the lady set a dozen pairs of little nimble 
feet flying about the neighborhood for the poul- 
try ; and one day she came, bringing a handful 
of small, green plants, chuckle-headed and cun- 
ning, and the secret of the fowls was out. They 
were " house-leeks." The brood was put in a 
tumbler and placed upon the bureau. 

But the mischief went on in the aviary. I 
think one of the crows was setting, ready to lay 
or hatch, or something, while the other was 
building a door-yard fence. It was the ninth 
day, when even puppies pass the limit of total 
eclipse, and something must be done. Another 
lady, also from the Bay State, proposed, as the 
cooking and baking had been done, and the pig 
comforted, that we should feed the — sheep ! She 
named carrots. The girls down stairs were set 
to washing carrots, and the procession of the 
golden vegetable began to move. First, a boy 
with a carrot in his claw, like Jupiter's eagle 



"MY EYE!" 239 

with a thunderbolt in his talon. Then a lady 
with a carrot on a tea-plate. Then a man with 
an immense fellow on a platter. Then more car- 
rots. Last, a grater, and the business began. 
My patient, anxious wife sat up all night grat- 
ing carrots. It sounded, in the middle watches, 
like the rasp of a distant saw-mill. Everything 
was the color of Ophir. For twenty-four hours, 
once in eighteen minutes, did she apply that car- 
rot ; and the crows began to grow uneasy. Their 
nest began to tumble to pieces. The repeated 
and tremendous assaults proved too much for 
them. The eye that had looked like an angry 
moon in a watery sky began to clear up, and 
recover its blue-white porcelain look once more. 
The bandage was whipped off; but the team 
did n't pull even. My right eye had gone ahead 
in the business of seeing, and straightened the 
traces till they twanged like fiddle-strings. The 
left eye was drooping and languid. Things had 
a cloudy look. I saw two doctors, when only 
one had come in. I had two wives, with a face 
apiece, growing on a single stem, like a couple 
of cherries. My Massachusetts friends came in 
with their doubles. But the worst of it was, I 
had four feet, like a quadruped. Think of the 
expense ! Imagine the boots ! It was a worry. 
But I began this article. The crows are taking 
flight — to return, I trust, in the onl} r English 
Poe's raven ever knew — " nevermore." 



240 BAGGAGE. 

I am indebted to the Doctor and I always 
mean to be. There can be no doubt that he 
made those crows uneasy. The zinc was worse 
than the crows, and they could not abido peace- 
fully in one place. He has gone into the eye- 
business altogether, for he is a Surgeon in the 
Navy. He is going to sea. 

The brightest May sun breaks out of the cloud. 
It kindles the hills ; it touches up the woods, 
just ready to bud. A robin sings that same old 
song by the window. 

Thank God for Light. His resplendent crea- 
tion — Light, that came into being the moment 
He called it, like an instant and ready angel, 
watching at His feet. 

Thank God for eyes — the most delicate and 
exquisite of all our servants. Let us be Per- 
sians, and worship the Sun. Let us be Israel- 
ites, and pray with our faces toward the East. 



THE OLD ROAD. 241 



CHAPTER VII. 



THE OLD ROAD. 



In almost every old neighborhood there is an 
old road, disused and half forgotten, and we 
like to get away from the traveled thoroughfare, 
and wander, in a summer's day, along its de- 
serted route. 

Our grandfathers had a species of indomitable 
directness in making roads and making love 
that was wonderful to see. They did not be- 
lieve in the line of beauty ; there was nothing 
curvilinear about them, either in word or deed. 
They went by square and compass, and life and 
religion were laid out like Solomon's Temple. 
And so, straight over the hill, and right through 
the big timber, and plump into the swamp, and 
bounce over the " corduroy," went the old road. 

Its long bridges are broken and mossy now, 
and brown birds in white waistcoats build nests 
beneath them, undisturbed by the small thunder 
of the rumbling wheels. 

Nobody goes that way, not even the boys 



242 BAGGAGE. 

bound out for school ; for, ever so many years 
ago, in a November day, they have heard, a 
stranger went down- by the old mill — you can 
see the rim of its dry gray wheel from here — 
and was never heard of more. 

Years after, among the hemlocks, human bones 
were found, and to this day, on windy nights, 
groans come out of the gulf, and the troubled 
ghost is thought to be walking still. 

Over yonder are a broad-disked sunflower and 
a heap of stone. The latter was once a hearth, 
for a house stood there, and after the stranger 
disappeared the tenant grew suddenly rich, as 
the times went, and showed gold with unknown 
words upon it, that none of the neighbors could 
make out, and pretty soon he took all that he 
had and went West ; as some said to the " Gen- 
esee Country," and others to " the Ohio,'' which 
was yet more like a dream than the Genesee. 

After that, nobody would live in the house, 
and it grew ruinous, and was haunted, and people 
saw a light there in dark nights, or thought 
they did, and the children shunned it, except in 
the brightest of mornings, when the sun was 
shining and the birds were singing, and the cows 
went lowing, Indian file, to the pasture ; and after 
awhile, the old house tumbled down and crum- 
bled away. Such stories thrive along old roads, 
even as the Mayweed, and the thistles, that no- 



THE OLD ROAD. 248 

body ever cuts, and on whose pink tops the 
yellow-birds rock up and down, like little boats 
at anchor, till the Fall winds whistle away the 
golden birds and the white down. 

Even the brooks that used to tinkle across the 
track and under the little bridges, have somehow 
run dry, or gone another way, and you will see 
an old trough, dusty and bleached, by the road- 
side, the strip of bark, that brought the water 
from the hills, broken and scattered, and the 
earth worn hard and smooth with the tramping 
of many feet. Very long ago, a tin cup used 
to hang there, tethered with a string, for the 
sake of thirsty travelers. We like to stand by 
the deserted place, where only a broken thread 
of ice-cold water trickles its way down to the 
roadside, and fancy how eagerly, in the broad 
summer days, the horses, panting . through the 
heavy sand and up the rocky hills, thrust their 
noses deep into the overflowing trough of crystal 
coolness, while, now and then, the cautious dri- 
vers pulled up their heads with a jerk, until 
they heard the long-drawn breath of inarticulate 
content. 

We like to think that the dripping cup was 
borne to bearded lips that were eloquent and 
true of old, and lips, maybe, of beauty, that are 
dusty and dumb to-day ; that bees from the 
shimmering fields came bugling thither, and crept, 



244 BAGGAGE. 

with dainty feet, along the trough's damp edge ; 
that birds sat there, and drank and rendered 
their little thanks, and rode away upon the bil- 
lowy air; that now and then a squirrel, red and 
sleek, with snowy throat, flashed chattering along 
the zigzag rails, and flashed away again ; or a 
gray rabbit, with little noiseless leap and listen- 
ing ears, took hurried draughts and squatted 
among the alders till the panting dog had lapped 
the nectar of the wayside spring. 

There, where the Maple wears its crown, a 
lazy gate is swinging in the wind, sole relic of 
a fence that straggled round a home, of which 
the weedy, tangled hollow alone gives proof. 

It may have been some Rachel dwelt therein, 
who met a second Jacob at the spring, and 
Fancy listens for the words they said, not found 
in " Ovid's Art of Love," — the maid a matron, 
and the matron dead. 

And then, strolling thoughtfully along, where 
the track grows dim, and loses itself in the 
grass, we come to the beeches, whereto, we like 
to think, glad children once made pilgrimage. 
That chafed and sturdy limb has borne a weight 
more precious than its leaves. Upon the stout 
old arm, swayed to and fro like canaries in a 
ring, swung clusters of laughing girls and boys, 
and then beneath it, hand - in - hand, made bows 
and courtesies to the passing traveler, while 



THE OLD ROAD 245 

tattered hats of straw and wool tossed here and 
there proclaimed the coming stage. Ah ! there 
were days when, over the old road, ran the 
yellow, mud-stained coach ; laboring up its hills, 
and pitching along its log-ways, and lurching in 
its deep-worn tracks, and rattling down its steeps, 
and splashing through its brooks. 

And there, in that roofless dwelling, whose 
clap-boards rattle in the wind, behold " the stage 
house" of the elder time. Very grand people 
used to get out of that stage sometimes, and 
quite as grand were the dinners that the bustling 
landlady and her girls set forth. Then it was 
that the blacksmith, in his dusty shop across 
the road, was wont to lean upon his hammer, 
and discuss the merits of wheel-horse and leader. 

You can see, even to this day, the burned and 
blackened ring in the greensward where he used 
to " set the tire." Of the smithy and the man, 
no other trace remains. 

Children sometimes wander out to the old road, 
and wonder where it leads, and whether to the 
end of the world; and we delight to join them 
in conjecture ; to think what stalwart men they 
were, that, ax in hand, so bravely cut their 
way through the dim resounding woods, and 
rolled their cabins up; to think what "beauty" 
and what "beast" in elder times did pass along 
this road ; what laughter echoed and what jests 



246 BAGGAGE. 

went round; that canvas-covered wains in many 
a camp were scattered towards the West, and 
red fires twinkled through the leafy tents ; that 
soldiers in some old campaign, and ponderous 
cannon went that way to battle, and returned 
at last, but fewer than they went. This was 
the route of them, perhaps, who founded cities 
in the brave young West, its future sinews and 
its coming men ; of newly-wedded pairs bound 
for the later Canaan ; of murderers hastening 
from the hue and cry. 

Across its beaten path the deer have trooped, 
the Indian noiseless stole, the forest shadows 
fallen at high noon. Westward it went to some 
great lake, they said, where fields all ready for 
the plow grew green to the water's edge, where 
springs came early and golden autumns lingered 
late. 

Along that way, trampled beneath the driver's 
feet, the mail-bag went and came, and now and 
then a letter from the West ; a great brown sheet, 
and traced with awkward pen and faded ink, 
yet how like a ballad ran the homely missive : 
of green March fields, and February flowers; of 
Nature's meadows waiting for the scythe ; of 
clustering grapes that mantled all the w T oods ; 
of nearest neighbors but two miles apart ; of 
dreams of plenty and of peace. Blended there- 
with were memories of home and words of love 



THE OLD ROAD. 247 

sent back, and a little sigh, half breathed, for 
faces they never more should see. 

What tidings went, sometimes, of fortunes won, 
and fame, by errant sons ; of girls whose graves 
were made where the sunbeams rest, " when they 
promise a glorious morrow." 

Thus slowly to and fro crept the sweet sylla- 
bles of love, the untranslated Gospel of the 
human heart; and, though long on the way, they 
never grew chilly or old. 

Ah, those letters on huge, buckram foolscap, 
crackling when you opened them like a fire in 
the hemlocks, that used to be written when 
letters were as honest as an open palm ! Those 
old, half-naked letters, their blue ribs showing 
through, ventured out at long and painful inter- 
vals, were indited " after meeting," and were 
sure to contain religion, death or a wedding. 
The old-time writer, though wicked as Captain 
Kyd on week days, was bound to have religion 
enough in his letter to float it on Sunday, and 
he was no hypocrite that did it, for it was the 
deliberate, passionless transcript of his better self. 
Lay side by side an old letter of 1840 and a 
new letter of 1874 : the one right-angled, neat 
and snug in its white or buff jacket, wearing a 
medallion as if it belonged to the legion of 
honor, self -folding, self -sealing, self -paying, and 
ready for the road. The other in its shirt- 



248 BAGGAGE. 

sleeves, broad, long, and possibly five-cornered, 
written across its baggy back like a note at the 
bank, " for here you see the owner's name," — an 
" 18f " or a " 25 " done in red ink in a corner, 
and sealed with a pat of shoe-maker's wax or 
a little biscuit of dough. But as honest hearts 
were done up in those rude letters as ever were 
set going, and the awkward pages were more 
richly illuminated than an old Saint's Legend, 
with unadorned and simple friendship. 

But over on the new route they have strung 
the Telegraph, where the rise of flour and the 
fall of foes are transmitted by the same flash, 
and the price of barley and a priceless blessing 
go flickering along in company. The houses on 
the old road — what few there are left — stand 
with their backs to the railway and the tele- 
graph ; and the wheeled World, as it goes thun- 
dering by, looks askance upon the back-kitchens 
and pig-pens of the old-time. 

But the houses on the new road are very new, 
and smell of paint ; the blinds are very green, 
and the people very grand. The East and the 
West have kissed each other across the Con- 
tinent, and every body and thing between is 
brisk as a flea, and breathless as a king's trum- 
peter. Even Consumption has whipped up its 
pale horse to a gallop, and dashed into the 
steeple -chase of the Age. 



THE OLD ROAD. 249 

And year after year the old road grows dimmer, 
and the grass gets green across the track, and 
it is rechristened "the long pasture," and is sur- 
rendered to the lowing herds and the sinking 
birds. In the midst of a region humming with 
life, it alone is silent, and almost awakens human 
sympathy, so wandering and lost and desolate 
it is. 

Sometimes, as you dust along the turnpike, 
you can see it as it comes in sight round a 
clump of tangled trees, and "makes" as if it 
would venture into the new thoroughfare and go 
somewhere, but it never does, for, speedily sink- 
ing back into the hollow, it is lost among the 
willows. 

Like a very old memory in the heart is it, 
and all forget it but the Year. Spring remem- 
bers it, and borders it w T ith green and sprinkles 
it with the gold coin of the dandelion and the 
little stars of the Mayweed. Summer sends the 
bees thither to bugle among the thistle-blows, 
and the ground-sparrows build in its margins, and 
the faded ribbon of yellow sand grows bright in 
its glowing sun. The winds waft the breath of 
the morning over its desolate way, and the rains 
long ago beat out the old footprints it used to 
bear. Autumn sighs as it follows it through the 
ravine and among the hemlocks, and the drifts 
that Winter heaps are unbroken and stainless. 

32 



250 BAGGAGE. 

No bolder feet, old Road, ever left their im- 
press on other pathways ; no truer hearts than 
hastened on thy rugged way, have ever turned 
beautiful in the " better land." If there were 
ever those whose laugh was music, then thy 
woods have heard it. The daughters of the 
West are passing fair, but those young brows of 
old, whose white flashed white again from thy 
singing streams, and eyes glanced back to eyes 
— no brighter and no purer were ever bent above 
a classic wave. 

Like thee, those brows are furrowed and those 
eyes are dim. Like thee, Ambition's line fades 
from the eye of Time, and like the dusty "run- 
ways" of thy brooks, soft pulses have grown 
dry and dumb. 



A BIRD HEAVEN. 251 



CHAPTER VII. 



A BIRD HEAVEN 



Does any theological reason exist why there 
should not be in some blessed planet or other 
a Bird Heaven, a realm where the green gates 
of Spring are forever opening and the fruits of 
Summer are for ever ripening, whose skies are 
full of the downiest of clouds and the softest 
of songs ? 

Were I to be constituted the Peter of the 
gate of that Paradise, there are very few birds 
to which free entrance should not be given, ex- 
cept Cochin China, Shanghai, and Bramah Pootrah 
hens ; the raven should be admitted for the sake 
of the poet, and even the owl should have a 
hollow tree all to itself, and a meadow of mice 
for its portion ; but for prowling cats and naughty 
boys, for snares and for fowlers, there should be 
no salvation. No early frosts, no chilling rains, 
the cherries all free, and great fields of grain 
for the pigeons. Birds, everywhere birds ! Not 
a bush but would have a song in it, all trees 



2o2 BAGGAGE. 

would be " singing trees," and all nests sacred 
as so many little arks of the Covenant. 

Wicker baskets full of pearls with life in them, 
emeralds with song in them, swinging from bend- 
ing bough, hidden in the grass, rocking among 
the rushes, like the little Moses of old, and 
everybody as loving as Pharaoh's daughter ; no 
serpent in this Eden to charm ; no sky scarred 
with arrows, no plumage ruffled by storm — 
would n't it be a love of a place, that Bird 
Heaven ? 

Just a few people that should be forever say- 
ing over to themselves, " not a sparrow falleth 
to the ground without Him," might live there, 
and the eaves, the chimneys and the peak of 
the barn-rafters should be full of the twitter of 
swallows, and the martin -box should never be 
untenanted. The gate-post should have a cleft 
for a wren to dwell in ; the orchard be filled 
with the homes of the robin and goldfinch, 
and the currant - bushes thickly peopled with 
sparrows; nightingales should sing the night out, 
and the larks go heavenward to make song in 
the morning. The plaint of the whip-poor-Avill 
should be there, and the mourning of the wood- 
doves heard from the twilight of the groves. 
Flotillas of white sea-fowl should float upon the 
smooth waters, and the mote below the edge of 
the cloud at anchor far up in the noon, should 



A BIRD HEAVEN. 253 

darken into shape, for an eagle should be there 
in the sunshine. The old tree -trunks in the 
pasture should be the homestead of blue-birds all 
the year long, and the lilacs, like the burning 
bush of the mountain, should be a-blaze with 
the wings of red-robin and oriole, and be not 
consumed. 

Time would forget to go on, and would tarry 
with June in such a midst. And the poet who 
so plaintively asked, 

" Where are the birds that sang 
An hundred years ago ? " 

would find them there, with the sweet old song 
that charmed an humbler world. And, may be, 
we should learn the bird language then, and 
would know what the robins were saying, and 
the chirping of sparrows be turned to the 
choicest of English. 

There in the meadow, all the days in the year, 
Robert o' Lincoln should ring his chime of bells; 
there in the leafy cloisters, " Bob White " should 
be incessantly called ; there on the nodding 
thistle-blossoms, the yellow-bird should ride as 
.the summer wind went gently by. 

And what would a June be without roses? 
And so the sod should be enameled, and the 
woods should not be lonely for them. The timid 
children of the Rainbow, that fled before the 



254 BAGGAGE. 

plowshare, should grow bold again, and start up 
like young quails from their hiding, and cluster 
round the door-stone, and swing themselves up 
to the roof by green shrouds of their own, and 
swing themselves down the damp, mossy sides 
of the spring, and be numbered with the house- 
hold. 

And here, to this Bird Heaven, one should come 
who all his earthly life long was a loving child 
of Nature ; who saw in the feather fallen from 
the blue bird in its flight the tinting of the Hand 
that touched the tented sky with azure ; in the 
red bird's glowing wing, the finger-prints of Hi in 
who wove a ribbon of the falling rain, and 
bound therewith the cloudy brow of storm : 
Audubon should come and go at will. The free- 
dom of the planet should be his. 

And the world adjoining, and lying in full 
sight, should be a Tophet for the slayers of 
robins and sparrows ; the men whom want of 
worth makes " fellows" ; who lurk about the 
woods, in the yet unraveled leaf, and prowl in 
the orchards white with the sweet drift of apple- 
blossoms, and murder the builders of the homes 
of song ; the ruffians who, in bright top-boots 
and game-bag cap-a-pie, return elated with two 
dead blue-birds and a lark without a head , 
who break a thrush's wing, and misname it 
" sport," and pass disguised as men. And in 



A BIRD HEAVEN. 255 

that Tophet they should play Nimrod, with kick- 
ing muskets shooting empty air ; the crows should 
live with them, and Nero to fiddle for them, 
and a filer of saws for orchestra ; and so, like 
Alexander the coppersmith, they should be re- 
warded " according to their works." 

Who can imagine a birdless June, or could 
love a grove rich as Vallombrosa in leafy beauty, 
that sheltered no bird, rustled with no wings, 
along whose green corridors floated no little song? 

With what elegance of form, grace of motion, 
brilliancy of coloring, and sweetness of utterance 
do they fill the summer world. How like carrier- 
doves are they, forever bringing messages of 
peace from the bosom of Nature even to our 
own ; and a wintry thing indeed is the happi- 
ness that has no birds in it. 

As he can not be altogether evil who cherishes 
a flower, makes friends with the little violet 
until it pleads for him, so they who love birds 
for their beauty and song have yet something 
in themselves that is lovely. 

And this lingering trace of an Eden-born na- 
ture gives to the denizens of the air a commer- 
cial value beyond that of the provision market. 
Who would think, without thinking, that more 
than seventeen thousand song birds are annually 
sold in New York ? The linnets, finches and 
thrushes of the Hartz Mountains, the canaries 



256 BAGGAGE. 

from Antwerp and Brussels, the skylarks from 
English fields, and the painted sparrows from 
Java are among the multitude. Seventy-five 
thousand dollars expended in a single city every 
year for birds, not to be grilled or fricasseed, but 
to be admired for their beauty or loved for their 
song ! Here are the figures for a single year of 
this graceful trade in the city of New York : 

12,500 Canaries $31,250 

600 Gold Finches Coo 

75 Blackbirds 525 

30 Nightingales 425 

600 Linnets 600 

100 Skylarks 400 

700 Fancy Pigeons, imported 4,000 

20 Gold and Silver Pheasants 200 

650 Parrots 4,900 

300 Birds of Paradise gco 

150 Mocking Birds ... 2,250 

600 Java Sparrows goo 

250 White and Red Cardinals 575 

80 Fire Birds 225 



i7.coo $47,750 

In 1873, ninety-five thousand canaries were sold 
in America — birds enough to make a golden 
cloud and hide the sun at high noon. And how 
kind it was of Chief Justice Chase to decide, in 
1872, that in the intent of the law imposing a 
tax upon imported animals, birds were not ani- 



A BIRD HEAVEN. 257 

mals, and so the wings and the warblers enter 
the United States duty free ! 

Who can help following those wicker cages 
with their little tenants, as, borne here and there, 
they make " the winter of our discontent" a 
summer ; to some gloomy room with its one win- 
dow and its narrow strip of sky ; to the chamber 
of the invalid and the garret of poverty. There, 
under the dim sky-light, and there, by the one 
window, and there, by the couch of languishing, 
the captives sit and sing — sing, though no 
" sweet South " is blowing, and no soft sky is 
bending, and no green branch is rustling ; sit and 
sing while the fall rains beat upon the panes ; 
while the snows drift white upon the threshold ; 
and then, when, through the smoky air and the 
dull window, there comes a gush of sunshine, 
what a burst of the old woodland melody there 
is, till the listening heart is full of the sweet 
thoughts of summer, and so they sing out sorrow's 
night, and u joy cometh in the morning." 



IT is with a sort of regret, shared perhaps by 
nobody else, that I end these sketches. We 
always get into the habit of things, and habit 
comes to rest easity, like an old garment. I do 
not now remember much of anything I was not 
a little sorry to part with, except a jumping 



258 



B A G G A G E . 



toothache. But the best thing I can do, after 

wishing' my readers a pleasant trip by the World 
on Wheels and a pleasant Station at last, is to 



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71 3 



